Well, I am for now.
I noticed Baidu pretty much on a forum of mine 24/7, but I didn’t recall ever seeing them show up in the referrer logs. Over the past year, across the sites on my server, they’ve made almost 35,000 requests for pages; chewed up 337 megs of bandwidth, admittedly not a big amount; and sent 1 referral. And the forum I first noticed it on only has the home page indexed. So since it doesn’t seem to be doing anything for my English language sites, it’s going to start getting blocked. Maybe I’ll change my mind down the road.
The spider picture on our forum right now is: Yahoo! (2), MSN (6), Google (AdSense), EntireWeb, Baidu (28).
28 of them? What on earth are they all doing?
Since we don’t sell to the Chinese market, I am thinking of blocking them too.
That’s exactly why I blocked them. I don’t doubt that I’m potentially giving up some traffic from China, but I also don’t want my server getting hit that hard. Maybe if somewhere down the road Baidu starts to do a better job throttling I’ll lift the block, but for now it’s done through httpd.conf so no accounts get hit.
It also blocked baidu china and baidu japan … in my firewall.