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Robots & crawl control

How to block 360Spider

360Spider is the crawler for so.com, the search engine operated by Qihoo 360 in China. This page shows how to disallow 360Spider in robots.txt, confirms what a block affects, and how to check the crawler honours it.

Partially verified

robots.txt rule

Qihoo 360's crawler identifies with the 360Spider token. To disallow it site-wide:

User-agent: 360Spider Disallow: /

Confirm the exact token from your access logs, because Qihoo operates more than one crawler and a single token may not cover image or other specialised fetchers. Match on the documented token, not a full version string.

Scope and limits

Blocking 360Spider affects only Qihoo 360's so.com crawler; Baidu, Google, and Bing are unaffected and keep their own tokens. A Disallow does not remove pages already in so.com — use noindex on a fetchable URL for that.

Because the user agent can be copied, persistent hits after a correct rule may indicate a non-compliant scraper rather than the genuine 360Spider, which compliant-crawler etiquette would have stopped.

How it appears in analytics and logs

360Spider hits indicate Qihoo 360 is crawling for so.com. If they continue after a Disallow, suspect a token mismatch, a cached robots.txt, or a spoofed user agent.

Diagnostic use case

Reduce crawl from 360Spider on sites without a Chinese so.com audience, or keep specific paths out of Qihoo 360's index.

What WebmasterID can help detect

WebmasterID logs 360Spider activity as a search bot, so you can see whether crawl volume drops after the rule is added — the observable proof that it is being respected.

Common mistakes

Privacy and accuracy notes

The rule targets the 360Spider crawler token and involves no visitor data. robots.txt is a request to compliant crawlers, not an enforcement layer.

Related pages

Sources and verification notes

Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.