Banning Baidu?

[MKJones]

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Hi

I run a very large video site with all the content related to youtube - their videos etc. The site has become very popular especially with regard to search engines. One in particular - baidu search engine - is very aggressive and uses up a lot of bandwidth. I run a vps for this site and even though I don't host any videos on the server it is currently using 7GB of outgoing bandwidth a day now! This amount of bandwidth will cause me to have to fork out for extra bandwidth per month at quite a cost, or upgrade to a dedicated server (I intend to do this eventually). I don't like having to ban any search engine but I might well have to in this case. I don't get any traffic from this baidu search engine because as far as I know China is banning youtube videos. Who knows what the future holds though and even though my site doesn't get any traffic from china yet it is now rated as 32,000 there which is very odd.

Is it in my interest to ban this spider (for now maybe) or not?

Regards
Mark

[carleisenstein]

I think it would depend very much on how you're monetizing your site. If it's CPA deals and the like you're probably not going to get much benefit from Chinese traffic. If it's cpm deals then it might get you some cash to get a prominent placement in baidu. But even then, will low quality traffic annoy your advertisers and reduce their propensity to buy space?

Personally if baidu's costing you money and you're not targeting the Chinese market I'd have little hesitation in blocking them.