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

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Why semrushbot and ahrefsbot are blocked by default?

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