I was checking the Google Search Console coverage report and found that lots of our forum pages are blocked by robots.txt. So I went ahead and checked the robots.txt. Then I found that semrushbot and ahrefsbot are blocked by default: [image] I know these are two widely used SEO tools, why blocking…

[image] Jamie_Liu1: I know these are two widely used SEO tools, why blocking their bots? Because they suck? They add a lot of server load for no discernable benefit, and our customers do have pageview limits on their plans.

Why semrushbot and ahrefsbot are blocked by default?

Support

Johani (Joe) December 2, 2020, 4:34pm 11

429 errors mean that those crawlers are getting rate-limited. Discourse has some throttling enabled by default to prevent abuse. You can read more about this here.

3 Likes

Topic		Replies	Views
Why there are lots of Disallow rule in robots.txt? Support	34	4430	December 22, 2020
Google changed how they process robots.txt in Discourse? Support	20	1577	December 22, 2020
Needing to edit robots.txt file - where is it? Support	42	7277	April 29, 2023
Google complaining – Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt Support	24	2410	September 28, 2023
Generic rules in "robots.txt" not picked up by Googlebot Support	6	965	April 2, 2022

Why semrushbot and ahrefsbot are blocked by default?

Related topics