LocalTradesBot

What it does

Local Trades publishes a directory of trades businesses on Vancouver Island. Every fact in it has to come from somewhere checkable, so the crawler reads what a business publishes about itself: the phone number on its own site, the services it says it offers, a licence number it displays.

It reads the same pages any visitor can read. It does not fill in forms, it does not try to reach anything behind a login, and it does not collect personal information about your customers.

What we publish from it

Contact details and services a business already publishes, alongside where we found them and the date we checked. Licence numbers are published only after we confirm them against the issuing registry. If we cannot confirm a claim, we leave it out rather than repeat it.

Listings are free. Nothing about a business changes based on whether it buys anything from us.

How it behaves

• It obeys robots.txt. A path you disallow is not fetched.
• It requests a small number of pages per site, spaced out, and does not return often.
• It identifies itself on every request with the User-Agent above, so you can recognise it in your logs and allow or block it by name.

How to block it

Add this to your robots.txt and it will stop. You do not need to tell us, and nothing bad happens to your listing if you do.

User-agent: LocalTradesBot
Disallow: /

Blocking the crawler means we can no longer check the details on your listing, so it will show less about you over time rather than more.

Something wrong on your listing?

Tell us and we will fix it. That includes asking to be removed entirely. A person reads these, and corrections are free.

[email protected]