Crawlers and spambots are the scourge of medium to small websites.
I run a small wiki that gets just a few thousand human hits a day. But according to the server logs 90% of server hits are crawlers and spambots, so I'm using 10 times the resources I really need to serve customers.
I finally resorted to blocking entire data centers and companies that crawl constantly but send no traffic.
I feel like search engines should crawl websites in proportion to the traffic they send. For example, Yandex, Baidu, and Bing were all crawling my website hundreds or thousands of times a day, but never sending a single visitor (or in the case of Bing sending single-digit visitors). It's an absurd waste of resources, so I blocked them completely.
I run a small wiki that gets just a few thousand human hits a day. But according to the server logs 90% of server hits are crawlers and spambots, so I'm using 10 times the resources I really need to serve customers.
I finally resorted to blocking entire data centers and companies that crawl constantly but send no traffic.
I feel like search engines should crawl websites in proportion to the traffic they send. For example, Yandex, Baidu, and Bing were all crawling my website hundreds or thousands of times a day, but never sending a single visitor (or in the case of Bing sending single-digit visitors). It's an absurd waste of resources, so I blocked them completely.