Skip to main content

How to block Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA crawler

Operated by Yahoo. is a search engine crawler operated by Yahoo Japan that indexes web pages for inclusion in Yahoo Japan's search results. This bot visits websites t… Search Engine Crawler Systematically scans and indexes web pages to include in search results

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 ~* "(Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA|Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA crawler)") {
    return 403;
}

Apache

In .htaccess or the vhost.

Apache
BrowserMatchNoCase "Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA crawler" 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 "Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA") or (http.user_agent contains "Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA crawler")

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 (['Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA', 'Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA crawler'] as $needle) {
        if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
            status_header(403);
            exit('Blocked: Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA crawler');
        }
    }
});

A rule on the user agent is a rule on a string it chose

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.

Others like it

Everything we know about Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA crawler