Question

Using TIME_HOUR to prevent search engine crawling

Asked by: mwecomputers

One of our Drupal sites is getting hammered in the daytime by search engine bots due to a taxonomy feed we have available. See code snippet for example.

Would something like the following mod_rewrite entry prevent search engine bots from crawling a certain Drupal directory structure between a time frame (i.e. 6am until 11pm), but allowing everyone else to still access the feeds?

192.168.xxx.xxx - - [15/Sep/2009:10:34:58 -0400] "GET /taxonomy/term/324/feed/ HTTP/1.0" 301 325 "-" "Yahoo-Newscrawler/3.9 (news-search-crawler at yahoo-inc dot com)"
 
 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(msnbot|googlebot|yahoo|newsbrain|rome) [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^taxonomy/term/[^/]+/feed$
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} >0600
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} <2300
RewriteRule .* - [F]

                                  
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Asked On
2009-09-15 at 08:08:20ID24733186
Tags

mod_rewrite

,

Apache

,

Drupal

Topics

Apache Web Server

,

Drupal

,

Search Engines

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: caterham_wwwPosted on 2009-09-15 at 10:52:52ID: 25337432

> Would something like the following mod_rewrite entry prevent search engine bots from crawling a certain Drupal directory structure between a time frame

Not directly, because you're checking the query_string bot your access log shows that there is no query_string. If/when they'd return is an other question (due to the 403). I'd issue a 503 statuscode (Service Unavailable).

You should check if the time dependent conditions are working since I've seen servers where they failed. You can issue a 503 by using R=503 instead of F as the flag. Apache 2.2 is required.

Your access_log shows a 301 redirect, so there seems to be something which issues an external redirect, too.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (msnbot|googlebot|yahoo|newsbrain|rome) [NC]
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} >0600
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} <2300
RewriteRule ^taxonomy/term/[^/]+/feed/?$ - [R=503]

                                              
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by: mwecomputersPosted on 2009-09-15 at 11:04:35ID: 25337524

Ok. I made the change using the code snippet (as seen below with modifications -- since the feed attributes can either be /###/feed or /###/###/feed), but if I am a regular user (calling the feed link directly via FireFox), I still get the 503 message which is what I don't want.

  RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (msnbot|googlebot|yahoo|newsbrain|rome) [NC]
  RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} >0600
  RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} <2300
  RewriteRule ^taxonomy/term/[^/]+/feed/?$ - [R=503]
  RewriteRule ^taxonomy/term/[^/]+/[^/]+/feed/?$ - [R=503]
                                              
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by: caterham_wwwPosted on 2009-09-15 at 11:22:32ID: 25337694

The order of processing is always rule-pattern --> conditions --> rule substitution. Your second rule has no conditions, a 503 would he served conditionless. So you need to repeat the conditions for your second rule.

 

by: mwecomputersPosted on 2009-09-15 at 11:27:02ID: 31628967

Works like a charm. Thanks for the help.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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