After blocking all traffic from China and Russia ( using Incapsula ) on an eCommerce application which only ship into USA, I noticed a significant performance improvement. Is there any drawback of country wide crawlers blocking consider SEO? Am I losing anything?  Fig 1: Look at AWS cloud watch. CPU usages, web traffic significantly reduced.Fig 2: Server response time incredibly improved - Newrelic.Fig 3: App index jumped up - Newrelic.
Is it ok to block search engine bots from China and Russia on USA based eCommerce site?
performance;seo;web traffic
Unless you get meaningful business from Yandex or Baidu then there's no disadvantage to blocking them.However, they're known to ignore robots.txt. I'm unsure if this has changed in the last 4 years but you'll be looking at a server level block. Their user agents are easy to spot, a .htaccess example would be:SetEnvIfNoCase User-agent Baidu spammer=yesSetEnvIfNoCase User-agent Yandex spammer=yes<Limit GET PUT POST>order deny,allowdeny from env=spammer</Limit>