Block/Ban search engines from outside North America.

[dafydd]

Is there some way to block/ban search engines from between eastern standard time and the international date line and north of the equator?

I don't mind Google, Bing, Yahoo, and such.

My website has a small following of members interested in fishing the Texas Gulf Coast and inland fresh water.

A spider, robot, that I can not find a home for or has an IP somewhere in Russia, UA, Europe, can only have nefarious intentions.

[kat]

http://www.robotstxt.org

[MrPhil]

You can block well-behaved robots via your robots.txt file. Any bot with nefarious intentions will simply ignore the file (i.e., following it is voluntary). Do you wish to confine your readers (and bots) to a given geographic area? Look into "blocking by IP address" in your .htaccess file. You could block countries by IP address, but that will block readers as well as bots. You can block by "user agent" in .htaccess, but there's nothing to keep a bad bot from claiming to be someone else.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish here? Are Russian, etc. bots causing some kind of load problem on your server, or do you have evidence that they're doing something nastier? If you're trying to keep your site from coming to the attention of potential spammers, you'll have to find a way to block all bots, both good and bad. There's nothing to keep a Russian spammer from looking at Google or Yahoo listings, rather than their local Russian search engine.

[Oldiesmann]

To be honest with you, I think attempting to block foreign search engines will actually do more harm than good. Besides the fact that it's almost impossible to block every single search engine spider that isn't run from an American server, you could very well be blocking your site from people who are interested in the subject despite not living in the same region as most of the people interested in that subject (Americans on business/vacation, military personnel stationed overseas, former US residents who are now living overseas for some reason or even just a foreigner who's interested in learning more about the American way of life).

99.9% of spiders are perfectly safe, and those that aren't will find ways to do what they want no matter how hard you try to block them.

Your best bet would be to just focus on other areas of your forum and worry about the harmful spiders if/when they come.