Blocking the Baidu Spider??

[Fergal]

This question comes from a suggestion made by a member of our business forum. He has noticed that we receive lots of visits from Baidu Spider bots to the forum and he suggests that we block them.

The advantages of blocking those bots would be that it would free up some resource on the forum, allow the site to download faster and help prevent the site content from being scraped and copied to other sites. The disadvantage would be that we would possibly lose some traffic coming from the Baidu search engine.

What's your opinion, do you think we should block the Baidu Spider bots?

 

[Luke]

Well, it's a Chinese search engine, it depends on if you get traffic and want traffic from China but yes, it does troll around a lot always indexing. It's a hard one but depends on the site really.

 

[karoshio]

Well, realistically there's is no significant downside to blocking it considering it's a Chinese Search Engine and your forum is English based but if your forum is to the point of considering it for a speed increase then I would say it's time for a server upgrade.

 

[Quacker Jack]

Well, realistically there's is no significant downside to blocking it considering it's a Chinese Search Engine and your forum is English based but if your forum is to the point of considering it for a speed increase then I would say it's time for a server upgrade.

This. Regardless if it is pointless or not, I don't think the Baidu spider will free enough space to make your forum noticeably quicker.

 

[Azareal]

Quite honestly, the more search engines that are able to index the site, the better in my opinion as users can discover it in alot more places.

If you're really having server issues with it though then, it's probably time to upgrade your server rather than, trying to block it as the others said above as one bot is unlikely to make a too significant difference.

 

[Pvt_Tracy]

I would have to agree with everyone, blocking the one bot wouldn't make a difference in the speed especially when you consider how many people are on here at one time. A server upgrade would be the best option for a speed increase, especially if it has multiple gigabit connections with multiple multi-core CPU's.

 

[SpeakWhatsReal]

I highly doubt any traffic is coming from the Baidu search engine anyway. Shouldn't be worried about content being copied, FP is one of a kind and always will be. leave it imo, more guests = more active the forum looks.

 

[Nuke]

I thought that this would be about Chinese spambots coming from Baidu so you should block them, quite honestly.

 

[SpeakWhatsReal]

I thought that this would be about Chinese spambots coming from Baidu so you should block them, quite honestly.

Baidu not necessarily is just chinese, a large majority of it is though 😛

 

[CyberFreak]

Baidu is already blocked here and has been for a while. Nothing good came out of Baidu (for us anyway but each site is different) and it can hit sites quite hard and request alot of pages in a short space of time.

 

[Fergal]

Thanks for the helpful replies everyone. I haven't made a definite decision yet.

...Shouldn't be worried about content being copied, FP is one of a kind....

Thanks SpeakWhatsReal, my question was about Business Advice Forum, not FP 🙂

Baidu is already blocked here and has been for a while. Nothing good came out of Baidu (for us anyway but each site is different) and it can hit sites quite hard and request alot of pages in a short space of time.

Thanks Fowler, is there an easy way for me to tell whether or not I'm getting useful traffic to BAF, from Baidu?

 

[CyberFreak]

You can use AwStats and that should tell you how much traffic if any you get from Baidu.

 

[Fergal]

Thanks Fowler, I will look at that.