Whitelist Search Engine Crawlers (Bots) in Firewall

Search engine crawlers: Good bots, Bad bots

Spider bots, also known as web spiders or search engine crawlers, are tools that automate repetitive tasks across the internet. They read almost everything on the pages they crawl. The data collected by bots is processed and utilized in various ways, making bots a dual-edged tool. They can be incredibly beneficial, enhancing internet functionality and business operations, but they can also be potentially harmful, posing security risks and ethical concerns, depending on how and for what purpose they are used.

Numerous web crawlers and bots, such as Googlebot, Bingbot, Baidu bot (Baiduspider), Slurp bot (Yahoo bot), Yandexbot, Sogou bot, Alexa crawler, DuckDuckBot, Slackbot, Facebook Bot, GPTBot, and etc, constantly scour the internet.

Good bots are utilized by legitimate businesses to perform useful tasks, like indexing your content with search engines or monitoring your websites for backlinks or system outages. Conversely, bad bots are commonly used by fraudsters or cybercriminals to perform malicious activities like stealing data, automating spam campaigns, or conducting denial of service (DDoS) attacks and vulnerability scans. These include credential stuffing bots, content scraping bots, spam bots, and click fraud bots.

Bots, while useful, can result in considerable resource consumption, including memory and CPU, potentially leading to increased server load and reduced website speed. Therefore, it's crucial to implement a robust and efficient detection system to identify and differentiate between beneficial and harmful bots. This will allow for the effective management of resource utilization and ensure that beneficial bots can operate without hindrance.

How can I generate a list of Search Engine Crawlers (Bots)?

Choose the search engines (bots) you wish to whitelist or blacklist. Then, select the desired output format and click the "Download" button.

The supported output formats include Apache .htaccess, iptables (CIDR), Netmask, Inverse Netmask, IIS web.config, and Cisco ACL. Please find the details below: