Web crawlers comply with the Robots protocol by first accessing the robots.txt file of a target website, typically located at the root directory (e.g., https://example.com/robots.txt). This file contains directives that specify which parts of the site should or should not be crawled. Crawlers parse this file and adhere to the rules defined, such as disallowed paths or crawl-delay settings.
For example, if a robots.txt file includes:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
Crawl-delay: 2
The crawler will avoid accessing URLs under /private/ and wait at least 2 seconds between requests to the same domain.
In cloud-based crawling scenarios, services like Tencent Cloud's Web+ or Serverless Cloud Function can help manage crawler workloads efficiently while respecting robots.txt rules. These platforms allow developers to deploy crawlers with scalable resources and automated compliance checks.