Block Bots by User Agent String
From Brian Nelson Ramblings
Contents
How to block a bot by User Agent Sting
Do you have those bandwidth hogging bots as much as Phil and I do? Did you know you can block them in your .htaccess file?
Block the BOT
Let block the most annoying bot on the internet - Baidu spider
vim .htaccess
Now Add the following to block bad bots
Via mod_rewrite
<Directory /> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Baiduspider [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Baidu [NC] RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F,L] </Directory>
Via BrowserMatch
<Directory /> BrowserMatchNoCase "Baiduspider" bots BrowserMatchNoCase "HTTrack" bots BrowserMatchNoCase "Yandex" bots BrowserMatchNoCase "AhrefsBot" bots BrowserMatchNoCase "Pinterestbot" bots BrowserMatchNoCase "YandexImages" bots BrowserMatchNoCase "YandexBot" bots BrowserMatchNoCase "Facebot" bots BrowserMatchNoCase "DotBot" bots Order Allow,Deny Allow from ALL Deny from env=bots </Directory>
That's it save the file, and you are now blocking the Baidu spider
Testing to see if its blocked
One way to do this is to use curl
curl -I http://www.briansnelson.com -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)"
Now you will get a 403 Forbidden
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2014 19:18:11 GMT