What is Baiduspider?

Baiduspider is the official web crawler for Baidu, China's dominant search engine. As a sophisticated indexing bot, Baiduspider systematically visits websites across the internet to discover, analyze, and index content for Baidu's search results. The crawler operates multiple variants tailored to different environments, including desktop, mobile, and mini-program ecosystems.

In server logs, Baiduspider identifies itself through distinctive user agent strings. The desktop crawler typically appears as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html), while the mobile version uses Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 9_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0 Mobile/13B143 Safari/601.1 (compatible; Baiduspider-render/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html).

Baiduspider exhibits specific behavioral patterns, including sequential resource loading with multiple concurrent threads per domain and variable crawl rates of 2-5 requests per second from a single IP address. Legitimate Baiduspider requests originate from IP addresses that resolve to hostnames ending with .baidu.com or .baidu.jp.

Why is Baiduspider crawling my site?

Baiduspider crawls websites to discover and index content that will appear in Baidu search results. If you're seeing Baiduspider in your logs, it means your site has been discovered and is being evaluated for inclusion in Baidu's search index.

The crawler is particularly interested in content that would be relevant to Chinese users, especially content in Simplified Chinese. However, it indexes content in all languages. Baiduspider may visit more frequently when you publish new content or update existing pages. Sites with higher authority or popularity in China typically receive more frequent crawling.

For websites targeting international audiences, including China, Baiduspider's visits are normal and beneficial, as they enable your content to be found by users of China's largest search engine. The crawler follows standard web protocols and respects robots.txt directives, making it an authorized visitor when operating within these boundaries.

What is the purpose of Baiduspider?

Baiduspider serves as the foundation of Baidu's search ecosystem, collecting and organizing web content to power search results for over a billion potential users. Beyond basic indexing, specialized Baiduspider variants support vertical search services like image search, video search, news aggregation, and local business information.

The data collected by Baiduspider helps Baidu understand web content, evaluate its relevance to search queries, and deliver appropriate results to users. For website owners, being properly indexed by Baiduspider provides access to the enormous Chinese search market, potentially driving significant traffic to your site.

Baiduspider also evaluates mobile-friendliness and content quality, factors that influence ranking in Baidu search results. The mobile crawler (Baiduspider-render) can execute JavaScript, allowing it to index dynamically generated content on modern websites.

How do I block Baiduspider?

Baiduspider respects standard robots.txt directives, making this the simplest way to control its access to your site. To block all Baiduspider crawlers from your entire site, add these lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /

To block access to specific directories or files while allowing the rest of your site to be crawled:

User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /members-only/
Allow: /

You can also control crawl rate by adding a Crawl-Delay directive:

User-agent: Baiduspider
Crawl-Delay: 5

This tells Baiduspider to wait 5 seconds between requests, reducing server load.

Blocking Baiduspider will prevent your content from appearing in Baidu search results, which may significantly reduce your visibility to Chinese internet users. Consider this impact before implementing blocks, especially if China represents an important market for your business. For most legitimate websites, allowing Baiduspider access while managing its behavior through robots.txt directives provides the best balance between server performance and search visibility.

More information about Baiduspider can be found on the Baidu Webmaster Tools platform, which also offers additional options for verifying and optimizing your site for Baidu search.

Baiduspider