How to Block Facebook Crawler Bot with CleanTalk for WordPress

A specific crawler you might encounter in your website logs is the "meta-externalagent/1.1" bot — to know it better, check the official documentation. Long story short — this bot focuses on content shared across Meta's platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Whether a link was shared directly or through a social plugin, FacebookExternalHit gathers information about the linked app or website – title, description, and thumbnail image – to display it correctly within the platform. It's important to note that this bot might bypass your website's robots.txt file during security checks to ensure the content is safe and free of malware.

The Facebook Crawler Bot’s Impact on Your Website

While Facebook's crawler bot can enhance your website's visibility, there are instances where blocking it might be necessary. If your website contains sensitive or private information, you may want to prevent it from being indexed and potentially exposed to a wider audience. 

Additionally, if your website is resource-constrained, the bot's frequent visits could impact its performance. In some cases, you might want to maintain complete control over how your content appears on Facebook, ensuring it's presented in the desired format and context.

Blocking Facebook's Crawler Bot with Robots.txt
You can also use a robots.txt file to instruct web crawlers, including Facebook's, which parts of your website they can access. To block Facebook's crawler bot, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

This will prevent Facebook's crawler bot from accessing any part of your website.

CleanTalk's User Agent Blacklisting Feature

To prevent this, CleanTalk's Anti-Spam plugin offers a powerful solution to block Facebook's crawler bot, stop Facebook indexing, and prevent Facebook from scraping your content. Use this method, if the bot keeps eluding the robots.txt restrains.

By leveraging this feature, you can:

• Secure your original content from unauthorized use and potential copyright infringement.
• Reduce unnecessary server load and optimize website speed.
• Safeguard sensitive information from exposure.
• Minimize the risk of search engine penalties by preventing duplicate content issues.
• By taking these proactive steps, you can ensure that your website's content is used only as intended.

How to Block Facebook's Crawler Bot Using CleanTalk SpamFireWall

Log in to your CleanTalk dashboard using your login credentials. Then, go to Personal Lists (1) -> Choose SpamFireWall Tab (2)  -> Pic the User-Agent type of filter (3) -> Type “Facebook” in the dropdown list to pick FacebookBot (4) -> Press the Blacklist button.

By following these steps, you can effectively safeguard your website's content and maintain control over how it's accessed and used.

To Block or not to Block?

Pros

The positive consequences of blocking Facebook's crawler bot may be in enhancing privacy by not allowing indexing of sensitive information, protecting intellectual property by limiting unauthorized use of your content, or improving the performance of the website by reducing an extra load on servers.

Cons

On the other hand, blocking the bot may have some negative consequences. It will reduce the visibility of your website on Facebook, possibly reducing social media traffic and engagement. This may hurt your brand's online presence and reach. It might also decrease the discovery of your content by users on Facebook, therefore limiting possible audience growth.

It is very important to consider your needs and priorities before deciding to block the crawler. If privacy and protection of content are the major concerns, then blocking the bot is the right decision. However, if social media visibility and engagement are more important, you might want to consider other alternatives or allow the bot limited access to your site.