Man, I remember when my website started acting weird after launching. Every morning I’d check the analytics and see these crazy traffic spikes that didn’t make any sense. Turns out it was search engine crawlers going nuts and eating up all my server resources. My hosting bill jumped up like crazy that month – felt like getting robbed in broad daylight!
The Search Begins
I started Googling “how to stop crawlers from killing your site” and kept seeing mentions of * everywhere. At first I thought it was some fancy programming thing, but turns out it’s just a simple text file you drop in your main folder. Felt kinda dumb for worrying about it when I realized how basic it was.
My First * Attempt
Grabbed my cheap coffee and fired up Notepad last Tuesday evening. Wrote two lines that changed everything:
- User-agent:
- Disallow: /tmp/
Saved it as plain text – no fancy formatting or anything. Used my clunky FTP client to drag it into the root folder. Took less time than brewing my coffee. Refreshed the site and… nothing blew up. Good start!
The Real Work Began
Next morning I checked server logs like a hawk. Saw crawlers actually reading my little text file! Added more rules block by block:
- Blocked staging sites completely
- Stopped crawlers from accessing my messy admin area
- Locked down old image folders full of test junk
Each change felt like putting up “Keep Out” signs on my digital property.
Shocking Results
After just three days, my server load dropped like a rock. Check this out:
- Bounce rate dropped 15% once real users stopped fighting bots for resources
- Hosting costs went back to normal – saved about sixty bucks monthly
- Stopped waking up to “server overload” alerts at 3am
Couldn’t believe such a tiny file made this difference. Reminded me of when I finally fixed that leaky faucet after months of ignoring it – simple solution for an annoying problem.
Why Bother With This?
Look, I’m no tech genius. If I can figure this out while half-asleep, anyone can. Benefits that slapped me in the face:
- Your real visitors get smooth experience when crawlers aren’t hogging bandwidth
- You control what shows up in search results (no more embarrassing test pages popping up!)
- Zero cost solution that works 24/7 while you sleep
This tiny text file became my favorite maintenance tool. Now I sip coffee watching analytics with actual humans browsing my site instead of freaking out over bot attacks. Best fifteen minutes I ever spent on site maintenance – why didn’t I do this years ago?
