Hi everyone — I’m hoping someone with real SEO or server experience can weigh in. I’ve noticed frequent requests from the Ahrefs crawler on my site and I’m considering blocking or limiting it to save bandwidth and reduce server load, but I’m worried about unintended side effects. I’d really appreciate practical, experience-based advice.
My main question is: Is blocking AhrefsBot safe from an SEO perspective, or will it negatively affect backlink discovery, monitoring tools, or the way third-party services report my site? I’ve seen conflicting opinions online and want to hear from people who have actually test-driven this on live sites.
I’m also unsure which method is best in practice. Does anyone recommend using robots.txt disallow, .htaccess/nginx rules to return 403, server/firewall IP blocking, or a softer approach like throttling and crawl-delay? What worked for you and what problems did you run into?
Another thing I’m worried about is data integrity. If I block Ahrefs, did you notice any difference in how backlink tools report your links or any issues with SEO audits and third-party crawlers? Were there reporting gaps, or did backlink metrics you care about remain stable?
If you’ve implemented blocking, I’d love to know operational details: Did it reduce server load noticeably, did it generate noisy error logs, and did you need to update rules frequently because of changing bot IPs? Concrete examples would help a lot.
Finally, if you decided not to block Ahrefs, what compromise did you choose? Has anyone successfully used rate-limiting, user-agent throttling, or monitored-and-alerted approaches to balance server load and keep backlink visibility intact? Any recommended thresholds or configuration ideas based on real-world usage would be hugely helpful.
Thanks in advance — please share what actually worked for you (or didn’t). Real-world snippets of what you changed and the observed outcomes will be far more useful than theoretical answers.
My main question is: Is blocking AhrefsBot safe from an SEO perspective, or will it negatively affect backlink discovery, monitoring tools, or the way third-party services report my site? I’ve seen conflicting opinions online and want to hear from people who have actually test-driven this on live sites.
I’m also unsure which method is best in practice. Does anyone recommend using robots.txt disallow, .htaccess/nginx rules to return 403, server/firewall IP blocking, or a softer approach like throttling and crawl-delay? What worked for you and what problems did you run into?
Another thing I’m worried about is data integrity. If I block Ahrefs, did you notice any difference in how backlink tools report your links or any issues with SEO audits and third-party crawlers? Were there reporting gaps, or did backlink metrics you care about remain stable?
If you’ve implemented blocking, I’d love to know operational details: Did it reduce server load noticeably, did it generate noisy error logs, and did you need to update rules frequently because of changing bot IPs? Concrete examples would help a lot.
Finally, if you decided not to block Ahrefs, what compromise did you choose? Has anyone successfully used rate-limiting, user-agent throttling, or monitored-and-alerted approaches to balance server load and keep backlink visibility intact? Any recommended thresholds or configuration ideas based on real-world usage would be hugely helpful.
Thanks in advance — please share what actually worked for you (or didn’t). Real-world snippets of what you changed and the observed outcomes will be far more useful than theoretical answers.