Just looking at some badwidth used by different search engine bots and trying to look at denying any bots that bring no traffic whatsoever... Picsearch is one I have noticed taking a lot of bandwidth, but not sure if it sends traffic - as not all search engines identify themselves as a referrer (and some referrer info is blocked by the user etc). So what is your opinion? - let it eat the bandwidth or block it? And is there a definitive list of 'search engine hogs' available that should get added to a block list (not because they are bad bots, but because they don't send traffic?).
If you don't have the bandwidth to spare, then block it. Otherwise, keep it free until you need that extra bandwidth, because even if it brings just a couple of visitors, that's a couple more than you would have had.
We saw this one hitting our site constantly. At first I figured it was for something like Flickr but I believe it's a bot that pulls images for use as thumbnails in SEs overseas. We saw no benefit from it and the consensus was to block it.
Well, that was my reason for raising the query as it originally searched for pictures - fair enough. However, it is indexing content pages and has changed from just being a picture search engine. The bandwidth is fine at the minute, but I was wondering if there was really any tangible benefits to this search engine and any others that act similarly, as it is very hard to match up which spiders are related to site traffic referrals (some are listed as organic, some as referrals and very few seem to match up with their spider ie googlebot = google.com traffic etc).
Any update on this thread? They've used 50% of my alloted bandwidth this month. And I don't even have images on my site!
I haven't really seen any traffic from them - if they are using too much of your bandwidth the best thing is to block it.