A summary of the BaiDuSpider Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the BaiDuSpider robot? Is it a good or a bad robot? And why is it visiting your website?
Shown below is a sample log file entry for the BaiDuSpider web robot. It’s derived from an Apache web server log file. From the log entry information about how the robot identifies itself, HTTP User Agent, and where it is hosted are given.
Server Log File
vntweb.co.uk 121.34.48.201 - - [12/Apr/2019:07:32:53 +0100] "GET /unrecognized-attribute-requestvalidationmode/ HTTP/1.1" 200 8631 "https://www.baidu.com/link?url=xzYq7aYyQFxHyETLk1oVfegYMsWE1l3W9AeVGj4VW2yKFY05gFwHwsrFYrKkcVd9AL1TSDkRU7zlbrzlXB0wiiTt1dapE3ot7xTHaAApSS_&wd=&eqid=d1c20b1c000cb219000000065cb030a9" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.132 Safari/537.36"
HTTP User Agent
vntweb.co.uk 157.55.39.54 – – [04/May/2019:05:14:58 +0100] “GET /wkhtmltopdf-web-page-screen-capture/ HTTP/1.1” 200 8929 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)”
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 121.34.48.201.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| inetnum: | 121.32.0.0 – 121.35.255.255 |
| netname: | CHINANET-GD |
| descr: | CHINANET Guangdong province network |
| address: | China Telecom |
| address: | No.31,jingrong street |
| address: | Beijing 100032 |
| address: | CN |
| last-modified: | 2016-05-04T00:04:27Z |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to China Telecom.
Owner
Baidu
Country
China
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website https://www.baidu.com/link?url=xzYq7aYyQFxHyETLk1oVfegYMsWE1l3W9AeVGj4VW2yKFY05gFwHwsrFYrKkcVd9AL1TSDkRU7zlbrzlXB0wiiTt1dapE3ot7xTHaAApSS_&wd=&eqid=d1c20b1c000cb219000000065cb030a9
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The Baidu website provides details about how their robot complies with the robots.txt exclusion standard, which was described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt, but is not currently available. Information is available on the same website https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and also on the w3c website at https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1.
Details are given about both preventing the robot from indexing the website and how to adjust its crawl rate.
Their advice is to include the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent BaiDuSpider from visiting your site
User-agent: BaiDuSpider Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of BaiDuSpider visiting your site, setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests can be set with the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: BaiDuSpider Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example, taken from their website the delay has been set to 10 seconds.
As is common with website crawlers there is a delay between changes made to the robots.txt file and the change being implemented.
Take care making changes to the robots.txt file. A misunderstanding in configuration or an error in configuration can lead to important search engines excluding your website.
Further Info
Baidu is a Chinese multinational technology company.
Included within Baidu’s portfolio is one of the largest search engines in the world. BaiDuSpider operates in support of this.
