Blocking Yandex

[Jack_mcs]

Yandex is Russia's equivalent of Google. It is also one of the largest reasons for excessive bandwidth usage on a site. Even if your hosting plan allows for enough bandwidth to accommodate the searches done by Yandex, it is unlikely your host will allow the extra load it creates on the server. But even if they do, having Yandex on the site is only hurting the site unless, of course, you are targeting Russia for potential customers.

 

So I suggest banning them completely from your site. If your host offers a way to block countries via its control panel, then you can block Russia through it. But Yandex realizes some sites will do this so they have purchased US-based IP's so such a block won't work. Their site states that they will honor an entry in the robots file but this is not true. The only way to really stop them is to ban their IP ranges, which continue to grow. Below is the current entries I use for this purpose. Just copy and paste this into the bottom of your root's .htaccess file. If others know of other ranges, please post them here.

deny from .yandex.com
deny from 5.255.192.0/18
deny from 37.140.128.0/18
deny from 100.43.64.0/19
deny from 141.8.128.0/18
deny from 199.21.96.0/22