Unmasking Ahrefs Bot: What It Is and Why It's Important?

As technology continues to evolve, it's not uncommon to come across bots that mimic human behavior online. One such bot that has gained attention is the Ahrefs bot. The renowned SEO tool built this bot to crawl web pages and collect data. 

What distinguishes it is its ability to crawl like a person, making it difficult to identify legitimate website users. In this article, we find out how the Ahrefs com robot functions and how it can benefit your website, which is crucial to achieving success in the digital world.

About AhrefsBot?

A web-crawling bot used by Ahrefs for SEO analysis

AhrefsBot, a web crawler managed by Ahrefs, a renowned SEO software suite, continuously explores the internet to collect and refresh backlink data. This ensures that Ahrefs provides users with the most extensive and current information available in their database.

Ahrefs Bot is a highly active crawler, searching around 5 million sites per minute. It has outperformed famous search engine crawlers such as Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. Among all SEO tool providers, AhrefsBot is considered the most active crawler.

How does Ahrefs bot work?

Ahrefs bot crawls websites to gather data for SEO analysis

Ahrefs bot is designed to crawl and collect valuable link data from numerous websites. This data gained from Ahrefs crawl is then sent back to the Ahrefs database, allowing them to provide their users with accurate and comprehensive information for marketing and optimizing websites. 

Ahrefsbot is highly efficient, crawling over 6 billion web pages within a span of 24 hours. The Ahrefs index of links is continuously updated every 15 to 30 minutes, ensuring that users have access to the most up-to-date information available.

Is Ahrefsbot A Good or Bad Robot?

A helpful resource for website optimization and SEO

As a business bot, Ahrefs bot may be both useful and negative depending on the context and how it is used. Consider the following points:

Case 1: Good Robot

There are some good Ahrefs bot name for your website: 

• Search engine bots (Googlebot, Bingbot, Yahoobot): A search engine bot is in charge of obtaining and indexing material from multiple Internet domains. Its objective is to collect information about each webpage for simple retrieval when needed.

• Commercial bots (Ahrefsbot, Semrushbot, Alexa): They are employed by businesses to imitate, help, or replace human actions, serving various purposes.

• Feed Fetchers (Facebook mobile, Twitter, Feedburner): Feedfetcher functions as a user's representative rather than a robot, disregarding robots.txt entries. As it serves multiple users, it optimizes bandwidth by only requesting common feeds once for all users accessing the feed through an app or service.

• Monitoring Bots (WordPress, Uptimer): They allow you to build passively monitoring bots that may execute administrative duties and access context from other resources.

These “good” bots enhance various applications, making them more valuable and practical for users.

Practical SEO Data You Can Use

The Ahrefsbot data is invaluable to the SEO and marketing community. It provides insights that help professionals optimize websites for top search engines like Google, enhancing their overall performance and visibility.

By allowing Ahrefsbot to crawl your website, you can ensure that your website is constantly updated in its database. This not only provides you with accurate data about your own website but also allows you to compare it with your competitors. With this valuable information, you can optimize your website effectively and prioritize the areas that need improvement to achieve higher rankings.

Case 2: Bad Robot

Besides the above good bot, we also face the bad robots doing some annoying things like: 

• Credential stuffing

• Content scraping

• Spam traffic

Ahrefsbot Can Make Your Site Slower

When Ahrefs bot visits your website, it uses bandwidth just like any regular visitor. However, if Ahrefsbot crawls your site too frequently, it can consume excessive bandwidth, resulting in slower loading times for other visitors. This can affect the overall user experience on your site.

Ahrefsbot Can Be Used By Spammers

As website owners, we must be aware of the existence of unwanted spammy referral traffic. It can be incredibly frustrating and detrimental to our website performance. These spammers have the ability to mimic ahrefs user agent, allowing them to continuously spam our website, send fake referral traffic, and even scrape our valuable content and data. 

Protecting your website from these harmful practices is crucial for maintaining optimal performance and data integrity. If you're consistently getting high traffic from Ahrefsbot, it's worth checking and comparing the IP Address ranges with the official Ahrefs information. 

Block Ahrefsbot Tutorial?

Methods to block Ahrefsbot from accessing your website

Method 1: Using robots.txt

According to Ahrefs, Ahrefs bot respects robots.txt rules. If you want to prevent Ahrefsbot from accessing your site, you can easily add new rules to your robots.txt file. There are two options accessible to you:

#Way 1:  Adjusting the frequency of Ahrefsbot's visits 

You can control how frequently Ahrefsbot visits your site by simply adding the following code to your robots.txt file:

#Way 2: Completely blocking AhrefsBot: 

Add the following disallow tag to your robots.txt file: 

That's all there is to it! Now that you've set up the robots.txt rule, Ahrefsbot will follow it accordingly. This ensures that the bot respects your website's guidelines and restrictions.

Method 2: with the .htaccess file

You will have complete control over your server if you take this strategy. Essentially, you'll be adding a list of the IP addresses used by the Ahrefsbot and then applying blocks based on those addresses. 

To demonstrate, below is an example of code that you may include in your.htaccess file to effectively block these IP addresses.

To ensure maximum security, it is crucial to block all the existing IP addresses associated with Ahrefs. Take the necessary steps to modify the code mentioned above, in order to effectively prevent any access from the current IPs utilized by Ahrefs. Ahrefs uses the following IP addresses:

• Part 1: IP Ranges

54.36.148.0/24

54.36.149.0/24

195.154.122.0/24

195.154.123.0/24

195.154.126.0/24

• Part 2: Individual IP addresses

168.119.64.245

168.119.64.246

168.119.64.247

168.119.64.248

168.119.64.249

168.119.64.250

168.119.64.251

168.119.64.252

168.119.64.253

168.119.64.254

168.119.65.107

168.119.65.108

168.119.65.109

• Part 3: AhrefsBot IP Addresses for Cloudflare

If you are utilizing Cloudflare as your website security provider, there is a possibility that the AhrefsBot may encounter obstacles due to the Cloudflare firewall. To overcome this issue, you can consider adding the specific IP addresses or IP ranges provided above to the firewall Whitelist, enabling Ahrefs Robot to access your website without any restrictions.

51.222.253.0

51.222.253.1

51.222.253.2

51.222.253.3

51.222.253.4

51.222.253.5

51.222.253.6

51.222.253.7

51.222.253.8

51.222.253.9

51.222.253.10

51.222.253.11

51.222.253.12

51.222.253.13

To ensure optimal blocking of Ahrefs' IP addresses, it is crucial to review and update the provided code. This will effectively prevent access from Ahrefs' current IPs and maintain security. You can keep up with the latest code by following the Ahrefs page.

FAQs

Can you stop a bot from crawling a website?

HTTP Authentication is an excellent approach to protect your website from bots. You may prevent unwanted crawling and safeguard your site by demanding a login and password.

Should I block Ahrefs?

It really comes down to your usage. If you're utilizing any of the Aherfs tools, it's advisable not to block it. However, if you have no intention of using their tools, it's best to block Ahrefs robots.

What does User-agent * disallow mean?

The directive "User-agent: *" in the "robots.txt" file indicates that the instructions are applicable to all robots. By including "Disallow: /", it instructs the robot not to crawl and index any pages on the site. It is crucial to consider two important aspects when utilizing the "/robots.txt" file for website optimization purposes.

What are bad bots?

Bad bots pose a serious threat as they are specifically engineered to engage in malicious activities like stealing content, hacking accounts, and launching DDoS attacks.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Ahrefs bot is a valuable tool for website owners and digital marketers. It provides detailed insights into website performance, backlinks, and keyword rankings, allowing users to make informed decisions and optimize their online presence. By utilizing the features and data provided by the bot, businesses can improve their search engine rankings, attract more organic traffic, and ultimately enhance their overall online visibility and success.

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