Blocking Bad Bots | Help Desk | Yakezie Forums

Hey all, I just had an interesting experience that required an interesting solution that I want to share with you.

A long time ago, I worked somewhere that blocked many websites from the office. To get around it, I used PHProxy installed on my server (a sub-directory on my personal blog). Just this week, it appears that Yandex, a major Russian search engine, began to scan that sub-directory.

Being a PHP tool, I started getting all sorts of warnings from Wordpress Firewall, and it appeared that Yandex was scanning my site constantly including that directory, which has since been deleted.

It turns out Yandex has bots that are quite relentless and use a lot of bandwidth. A little searching showed that I could add this to my .htaccess file and block them:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Yandex*" bad_bot
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from env=bad_bot

Anywho, if you see tons of bandwidth and resources being stolen by bots you don't really care about, you can use code like this to block them.