Crawlers in the community

[Ranjan]

Hi Team,

In the community dashboard, I see a lot of crawlers logging in to the site. I’m not able to know who they are and how they reached here.

Who are these visitors?
How can their activity and what kind of activity they are doing be looked into?
How can they be tracked?

Please help me with this info.

Have a good day!

Thanks.
Vidyaranjan

[osioke (Osioke Itseuwa)]

Hello Vidyaranjan,

Try checking /admin/reports/web_crawlers for a detailed report on the crawlers. You can then proceed to block whichever one you do not find helpful or useful by adding them to the blocked crawler user agents site setting. That setting takes a case insensitive word that exists in the user agent string.

[sebastianh (Rebastion)]

Sorry to bump this, but I haven’t quite found what I am looking for. So for one, the crawler stats the reports page has to offer give me info on the number of crawler page views, and their user agents, but little else in terms of what to do with that information. Crawlers in general are not a problem for me, but spikes in crawler access make the dashboard stats almost unusable

You see, one bump on december 16 leads to such a squeeze of all the charts that they become hard to read. Plus, what value does that information even hold? None. That was the day of the Google outage last week, so probably once google came back, all those crawlers ramped up their activity. Big deal.

So my question is this: Can I remove crawlers from the main admin dashboard stats?

[ondrej]

@sebastianh

Can I remove crawlers from the main admin dashboard stats?

Indeed you can. See at the top of the dashboard where ther are 3 options

Logged in users

Anonymous users

Crawlers

Just tap on crawlers and it will remove them.

[sebastianh (Rebastion)]

aha, thank you so much, never knew I could click on these