jprice / bad-bot-blocker

Block bad, possibly even malicious web crawlers (automated bots) using htaccess.

Bad Bot Blocker

223 Apache htaccess rules to block bad bots.

Bad bots are defined as:

• E-mail harvesters
• Content scrapers
• Spam bots
• Vulnerability scanners
• Aggressive bots that provide little value
• Bots linked to viruses or malware
• Government surveillance bots
• Russian search engine Yandex
• Chinese search engine Baidu

Yandex/Baidu

Unless your website is written in Russian or Chinese, you probably don't get any traffic from them. They mostly just waste bandwidth and consume resources.

Bots Are Liars

Bots try to make themselves look like other software by disguising their useragent. Their useragents may look harmless, perfectly legitimate even. For example, "^Java" but according to Project Honeypot, it's actually one of the most dangerous.

Setup

If you have a bizarre or complicated setup, be sure to look everything over before using it. But for anyone with something that resembles a standard Apache installation, this should work without any issues.