Blocking Web crawlers, bots, spiders, proxies, etc from private site areas
 

Hi

I have a web site that runs a number of different web applications; joomla, bugzilla, firestats, nagios, etc.

While I'm happy for my public site's content to be spidered and cached I would prefer certain apps such as bugzilla to not be, rather I would like to them to accessible via the web for employees, customers, etc but not be publicly advertised or searchable.

Is this something I should be worrying about, and, if so, how do I reduce the ability of say spiders to spider this content?

Any help much appreciated.

formally you would use the robots.txt file.

If you find people shouldn't have unrestricted access to some information for whatever reason the answer is "yes".


IMHO a robots.txt should fit in a set of measures like DMZ, firewall or per application or webserver configurable access restrictions and authentication, usage of HTTPS, reverse proxies, tunneling and whatnot. The best way to select stuff to implement is to look at what your nfo is worth.

Hi

Thanks for your replies.

First of all I should say that password protection should stop robots from accessing valuable data, but I guess I want to be proactive and don't what web searches turning up links to my private app area.

Next, I have configured a robots.txt and expect those robots that respect the configuration to not index those parts of my site that are off limits. However, I'm taking the approach that not every bot is good (e.g. they are not good bots like google, yahoo, curl, etc) and that there will be those bots that either, a) ignore my robots.txt, or worse, b) use robots.txt to carry out malicious attacks.