Disallow crawlers on the /data subdirectory
#334
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The `/data` directory just contains our data files. We noticed crawlers using 95% of the total bandwidth by scraping data files. We do not see the use case. Additionally, the explicit mention of the different user-agents is unnecessary. Most likely, it even did not do what it intended in the first place: googlebot (and I assume more) look at the most specific user-agent match, and follow those rules. That means that all the explicit mentions of the user-agents was doing, is to explicitly allow them to also crawl the /cgi-bin/ in addition to allowing everything else. That did not seem intentional. So, I took the liberty to simplify.
This was referenced Jul 10, 2024
josvandervelde
approved these changes
Nov 10, 2024
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The
/datadirectory just contains our data files. We noticed crawlers using 95% of the total bandwidth by scraping data files. We do not see the use case.Additionally, the explicit mention of the different user-agents is unnecessary. Most likely, it even did not do what it intended in the first place: googlebot (and I assume more) look at the most specific user-agent match, and follow those rules. That means that all the explicit mentions of the user-agents was doing, is to explicitly allow them to also crawl the /cgi-bin/ in addition to allowing everything else. That did not seem intentional. So, I took the liberty to simplify.