Baiduspider

Baiduspider is the official web crawler for Baidu, the leading search engine in China. This sophisticated bot is responsible for visiting websites across the internet to discover, analyze, and index content for Baidu's search results. It operates several variants for different purposes, including a desktop crawler (Baiduspider/2.0) and a mobile render crawler (Baiduspider-render/2.0) that can process JavaScript. Legitimate requests from Baiduspider can be verified by checking that the crawling IP address resolves to a hostname ending in .baidu.com or .baidu.jp.

Baiduspider is crawling your website to evaluate its content for inclusion in the Baidu search index. Its presence in your server logs means your site is being considered for discovery by Baidu's users. The crawler is especially interested in content relevant to a Chinese audience, particularly content written in Simplified Chinese, though it indexes all languages. The frequency of its visits is determined by factors like your site's authority, update schedule, and popularity in China. For businesses targeting the Chinese market, these visits are both normal and highly beneficial.

The primary purpose of Baiduspider is to build and maintain the extensive content database that powers Baidu's entire search ecosystem. Beyond general web search, its data supports vertical search services like image, video, and news search. The information it collects allows Baidu to understand web content, determine its relevance to user queries, and rank it appropriately. For website owners, being properly indexed by Baiduspider provides direct access to the vast Chinese search market, which can be a significant source of traffic.

If your target audience is outside of China and you wish to prevent Baiduspider from consuming server resources, you can block it using your robots.txt file. This is the standard method for managing crawler access.

To block Baiduspider, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /