Robots Are Our Friends

For a variety of reasons cultural heritage organizations often have robots.txt documents that restrict what web crawlers (aka robots) can see on a website. This is a bad thing because it means that the content that libraries, archives and museums are putting online becomes virtually invisible to search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, is less likely to be shared in social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and stands less of a chance of being incorporated into datasets such as Wikipedia. The Robots Are Our Friends campaign aims to help promote an understanding of the role that robots.txt plays in determining the footprint our cultural heritage collections have on the Web.

• https://twitter.com/rubinsztajn/status/265908774810824704

• While indexing a dynamic site, robots can put an extra strain on the server, causing a slow response, or in some cases, pegging the CPU at 100%.

crawl-delay

Several major search engines support the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt#Crawl-delay_directive crawl delay directive, which you can put in your robots.txt file. This directive lets you tell web crawlers the minimum delay to wait between two successive requests.

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 3

Google

1. Log in to Google Webmaster Tools
2. Select your site
3. In the left-hand side, select Configuration and then Settings
4. Under Crawl rate select Limit Google's maximum crawl rate
5. Use the slider to adjust the amount of requests per second/number of seconds between requests
6. Hit Save

Note: This may take a day or two to go into effect and it only lasts for 90 days, at which point it will revert back to Google selecting the crawl rate.

Bing

1. Log in to Bing Webmaster Tools
2. Select your site
3. In the left-hand side, select Configure My Site and then Crawl Control
4. Use the 2D chart to change the crawl rate for specific times of day. Or you can use the drop-down menu to move crawl activity to off-peak hours of traffic.

Note: Directives in robots.txt will override this setting (e.g. Setting Crawl-delay)

• Collection Achievements and Profiles System and DPLA Crawler Services
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Python's robotparser