Bots and Find/Search Pages

Hello,

We wanted to ask the community about how they might be dealing with bot traffic on their sites. Specifically if the traffic is affected by search/find pages. On our institutional showcase site, we have an issue at least once a month where a swarm of bot traffic can bring the site to a crawl. While we work with our IT team to try to limit it , we also noticed that a lot of the traffic centers around the different sites’ /find pages (around 50 of them, for example: Search · Ernst Westphal Collection (Centre for African Language Diversity) · Ibali). We wonder if there is something in the set up of the find pages that is allowing the avalanche to form. We frequently get the SQL- Too many connection error and are logs are full of items being accessed which don’t exist. It would just be interesting if there might be a configuration change that we could add that stops the bots from crawling down the search function of random content/string that they try and make up. Happy to share the config of our search if it will help.

We don’t have SOLR, we just have Advanced Search version 3.4.54. And we have one Internal[sql] adapter.

Thank you,
Sanjin

1 Like

Hi Sanjin, I recently faced the same problem with aggressive AI bots, the worst of all was ClaudeBot.

The screenshot below shows an extract of my web server log one month ago: the user agents are ordered by the number of requests they sent to one of my sites during a couple of hours. Your IT team should be able to generate the same kind of output.

You see that ClaudeBot sends over 40’000 times more requests than the second bot (Bytespider) and over 100’000 times more than Googlebot.

To get out of this hell, I edited my .htaccess and added the following lines:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “ClaudeBot” BadBot
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from env=BadBot
Allow from all

Each request from ClaudeBot gets now a “403 Forbidden” response and my website has regained peace and serenity.

You may find some other examples using different syntaxes, I hope you find a way to identify and solve the problem.

1 Like