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How to block Sogou Push Spider

Operated by Sogou. is a web crawler operated by Sogou, a Chinese search engine company. This bot crawls and indexes web pages for inclusion in Sogou's search results, serv… Search Engine Crawler Systematically scans and indexes web pages to include in search results

How it identifies itself

Sogou News Spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)

robots.txt

What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.

robots.txt
User-agent: Sogou Push Spider
Disallow: /

nginx

In the server block, then reload.

nginx
# In the server block. 403 rather than 444: a closed connection tells the
# operator nothing, and an agent that gets a status code can log it.
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Sogou Push Spider)") {
    return 403;
}

Apache

In .htaccess or the vhost.

Apache
BrowserMatchNoCase "Sogou Push Spider" bad_bot

<RequireAll>
    Require all granted
    Require not env bad_bot
</RequireAll>

Cloudflare

Security → WAF → Custom rules.

Cloudflare
# Security → WAF → Custom rules, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Sogou Push Spider")

WordPress

A child theme's functions.php, or a small plugin.

WordPress
// functions.php of a child theme, or a small plugin. Runs before WordPress
// builds the page, so a blocked agent costs one PHP process and no queries.
add_action('init', function () {
    $agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ?? '';

    foreach (['Sogou Push Spider'] as $needle) {
        if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
            status_header(403);
            exit('Blocked: Sogou Push Spider');
        }
    }
});

robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.

Sogou Push Spider publishes a token, so the directive above will work for as long as it keeps honouring it — and nothing except its own good manners makes it. The server rules match on a header the requester sets, which stops the agent that says who it is and not the one that copies somebody else's name. Botscope verifies identity against DNS and published address ranges, records which check decided each request, and shows you the ones that lied.

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