---
title: "How to Stop Search Engines from Crawling your Website"
description: "In order for your website to be found by other people, search engine crawlers, also sometimes referred to as bots or spiders, will crawl your website looking for updated text and links to update..."
url: https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/how-to-stop-search-engines-from-crawling-your-website/
date: 2011-11-02
modified: 2025-06-12
author: "InMotion Hosting Contributor"
categories: ["Search Engine Optimization", "Website"]
type: post
lang: en
---

# How to Stop Search Engines from Crawling your Website

In order for your website to be found by other people, **search engine** crawlers, also sometimes referred to as bots or spiders, will **crawl** your website looking for updated text and links to update their search indexes.

## How to Control search engine crawlers with a robots.txt file

Website owners can instruct search engines on how they should crawl a website, by using a **robots.txt** file.

When a search engine crawls a website, it requests the **robots.txt** file first and then follows the rules within.

It’s important to know **robots.txt** rules don’t have to be followed by bots, and they are a guideline.For instance, to [set a Crawl-delay for Google](/support/website/google-tools/setting-a-crawl-delay-in-google-webmaster-tools/) this must be done in the [Google Webmaster tools](/support/website/google-tools/introduction-to-google-webmaster-tools/).
For bad bots that abuse your site you should look at [how to block bad users by User-agent in .htaccess](/support/website/block-unwanted-users-from-your-site-using-htaccess/#block-by-user-agent).

## Edit or create robots.txt file

The **robots.txt** file needs to be at the root of your site. If your domain was **example.com** it should be found:

**On your website**:

https://example.com/robots.txt
**On your server**:

/home/userna5/public_html/robots.txt
You can also [create a new file](/support/website/create-new-file/) and call it **robots.txt** as just a plain-text file if you don’t already have one.

## Search engine User-agents

The most common rule you’d use in a **robots.txt** file is based on the **User-agent** of the search engine crawler.

Search engine crawlers use a **User-agent** to identify themselves when crawling, here are some common examples:

**Top 3 US search engine User-agents**:

Googlebot

Yahoo!

Slurp bingbot
**Common search engine User-agents blocked**:

AhrefsBot

Baiduspider

Ezooms

MJ12bot

YandexBot

## Search engine crawler access via robots.txt file

There are quite a few options when it comes to controlling how your site is crawled with the **robots.txt** file.

The **User-agent:** rule specifies which User-agent the rule applies to, and ***** is a wildcard matching any User-agent.

**Disallow:** sets the files or folders that are **not allowed** to be crawled.

Here are some of the most common uses of the **robots.txt** file:

[Set a crawl delay for all search engines](#crawl-delay)

[Allow all search engines to crawl website](#allow-all)

[Disallow all search engines from crawling website](#disallow-all)

[Disallow one particular search engines from crawling website](#disallow-one)

[Disallow all search engines from particular folders](#disallow-folders)

[Disallow all search engines from particular files](#disallow-files)

[Disallow all search engines but one](#disallow-all-but-one)

**Set a crawl delay for all search engines**:

If you had 1,000 pages on your website, a search engine could potentially index your entire site in a few minutes.

However, this could cause [high system resource usage](/support/website/what-is-high-system-resource-usage/) with all of those pages loaded in a short time period.

A **Crawl-delay:** of **30** seconds would allow crawlers to index your entire 1,000 page website in just **8.3 hours**

A **Crawl-delay:** of **500** seconds would allow crawlers to index your entire 1,000 page website in **5.8 days**

You can set the **Crawl-delay:** for all search engines at once with:

**User-agent:** *****
**Crawl-delay:** **30**

**Allow all search engines to crawl website**:By default search engines should be able to crawl your website, but you can also specify they are **allowed** with:
**User-agent:** *****
**Disallow:**

**Disallow all search engines from crawling website**:

You can **disallow** any search engine from crawling your website, with these rules:

**User-agent:** *****
**Disallow:** **/**

**Disallow one particular search engines from crawling website**:You can **disallow** just one specific search engine from crawling your website, with these rules:
**User-agent:** **Baiduspider**
**Disallow:** **/**

**Disallow all search engines from particular folders**:

If we had a few directories like **/cgi-bin/**, **/private/**, and **/tmp/** we didn’t want bots to crawl we could use this:

**User-agent:** *****
**Disallow:** **/cgi-bin/**
**Disallow:** **/private/**
**Disallow:** **/tmp/**

**Disallow all search engines from particular files**:If we had files like **contactus.htm**, **index.htm**, and **store.htm** we didn’t want bots to crawl we could use this:
**User-agent:** *****
**Disallow:** **/contactus.htm**
**Disallow:** **/index.htm**
**Disallow:** **/store.htm**

**Disallow all search engines but one**:

If we only wanted to allow **Googlebot** access to our **/private/** directory and disallow all other bots we could use:

**User-agent:** *****
**Disallow:** **/private/**
**User-agent:** **Googlebot**
**Disallow:**
When the **Googlebot** reads our **robots.txt** file, it will see it is not disallowed from crawling any directories.

**Professional Websites Without the Tech Headaches**

Our team will build a beautiful WordPress site and take care of updates, security, and maintenance – so you can focus on running your business.

[Let Us Handle It for You](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/services?mktgp=t&irgwc=1&affiliates=5001860&utm_campaign=Jumbotron&utm_source=supportcenter&utm_medium=cta&utm_term=pro-websites-cta3)