[ryanhellyer]

I was recently asked by a colleague, how to go about limiting the amount of traffic a site receives by robots.

It is easy enough to totally prevent them from visiting, a simple noindex meta tag will fix that quite easily. But is it possible to simply reduce the number of visits from bots?

Sitemaps give you the option to specify how often you would like bots to visit, but AFAIK they simply use this as a relative measure. So if you say you want them to visit your home page every hour and your contact form once per year, they may visit your home page more often than your contact page accordingly. But my understanding is that they don't obey your commands per se, just that they use it as a guide to how important your various pages are. Or perhaps I have misunderstood?

Any ideas/suggestions?

In case you wondering why they would want to limit the number of bot visits, it is because the cost of bandwidth within our organisation is quite expensive. The cost per year from robots is about $120 whereas the cost due to humans is only $80. The site is rarely updated, so it seems pointless for the bots to be visiting the site every minute which they seem to be doing at the moment.