What the crawler does
- It reads the sitemap a customer submits, then fetches the pages that sitemap lists, one request per page.
- It makes one request to each outbound link it finds, to see where the link leads.
- It only reads public pages. It doesn’t log in, fill in forms or run scripts.
- It identifies itself with the user agent
LinkSignalsBot/1.0 (+https://linksignals.cloud; outbound link audit, reads public pages only).
What stops it, and what doesn’t
| Method | Stops it? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ask us to exclude your domain | Yes, completely | We add your domain to an exclusion list. After that nothing is requested from it, whether through a scan of your sitemap or a check of a link pointing at your site. |
Block the LinkSignalsBot user agent on your server | Partly | Stops scans of your own pages. When someone else’s scan checks a link to your site and your server refuses the request, we retry once with a standard browser request, so this alone doesn’t stop those link checks. |
Disallow rules in robots.txt | No, not today | Link Signals reads robots.txt only to find sitemap addresses. It doesn’t apply Disallow rules, so adding one won’t stop it. |
Asking us to exclude your domain
Email hello@linksignals.cloud with the domain, preferably from an address at that domain so we can tell the request is yours. We add the domain, and its subdomains, to the exclusion list, and aim to do it within two working days.
- Anyone who submits a sitemap from your domain is told the owner has asked not to be scanned.
- A link to your domain in someone else’s scan is reported as Couldn’t check with “Not checked: the owner of this site has asked not to be requested”, and no request is made.
- If your domain is on one of the blocklists, a link to it can still be marked Not safe, because that check needs no request.
Blocking the user agent
These rules refuse any request whose user agent contains LinkSignalsBot.
# nginx (inside the server block)
if ($http_user_agent ~* "LinkSignalsBot") {
return 403;
}# Apache (.htaccess)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} LinkSignalsBot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]- Open your Cloudflare rulesIn Cloudflare, go to Security, then WAF, then Custom rules, and create a rule.
- Match the user agentSet the field to User Agent, the operator to contains, and the value to
LinkSignalsBot. - Block itSet the action to Block and deploy the rule.
What a scan shows when you block it
If your server refuses the crawler, a customer scanning your sitemap finds no links on those pages, so the scan reports far fewer links than expected. Link Signals can’t tell a blocked page from one with no outbound links.
Questions
Will blocking it affect my search rankings?
No. Link Signals isn’t a search engine and has no effect on how search engines see your site.
How often does it visit?
Only when someone runs a scan that involves your site. There is no schedule.
How much load does it put on my server?
Up to six requests run at once during a scan, spread across every site involved. For a single site that means one request per page in the sitemap.
If you own the site, scanning it yourself is the quickest way to see what a customer would see.
