Blocking Translator Traffic

[cowboy]

I have some sites where I'm getting tons of traffic from Google Translator tools and I'm pretty certain it's people scraping my content. So I found a way to block that traffic via .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} via\ translate [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} via\ babelfish [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} google\ Wireless\ Transcoder [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Sends translator tools to a 500 error page.

 

[Vladi]

Risky ... it could be real customers. After all it would be trivial to scrape the site then translate it later to get around your block.

 

[lots0]

I agree with Vladi, it could be real customers.

Instead of blocking the translator... Why not put up 'correctly' translated pages of your content?

 

[cowboy]

I feel pretty comfortable with the "risk" after studying the stats. Keeps translating all the pages into Russian in the space of a few minutes. I think it's something automated and I'm betting they won't bother if the automated method is blocked. I know I've never made a dollar off a Russian player... So I'm rolling the dice.

 

[lots0]

Ahh you didn't say it was only Russian translations...

In that case I agree with you. Block it.

 

[dominique]

I feel pretty comfortable with the "risk" after studying the stats. Keeps translating all the pages into Russian in the space of a few minutes. I think it's something automated and I'm betting they won't bother if the automated method is blocked. I know I've never made a dollar off a Russian player... So I'm rolling the dice.

Been there, done the same.

 

[Aussie-Dave]

Thanks cowboy, I too am getting hit in similar fashion from Russian IP's crawlers(?) on a couple of my sites.

The content I have is specifically target to Australia. There is no valid reason for these hits.

Cheers



Dave