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By doing following things we can trap the spider:
1.Sitemaps
These help all the crawlers out there understand how many pages a website has. As a standard ruling you will create an XML sitemap that will list off your pages, usually in a priority order of how important they are and the frequency you wish for the page to be crawled.
2.Do a few standard checks; take a look at the content on the page:

Does it match up and better what’s on the first page of Google already?

Are you going to keep you users on the page and make sure they find what they are looking for?

Will they convert?

Does it need a video?

3.Check speed of your website
4.Use various technical checks done under SEO

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creaming Frog: Crawling a website using Screaming Frog can be a quick way to identify spider traps. If you have set the crawler so that it mimics search engine spiders and find that the crawl goes on forever it could be a good indication that a spider trap exists on your site.

Google Search Operators: Using the site: command can be a quick way to identify spider traps  as mentioned previous in this article

If you use site:websiteurl.com and use search tools to view results from the past day or week it will show you pages that have recently been indexed which can be used to uncover recently indexed pages that can sometimes be a result of spider traps

The site:websiteurl.com inurl:insertfilternamehere command can be used to quickly see if filtered pages are being indexed by Google

Using site:websiteurl.com “insert snippet of content from your website here” can be used to determine whether or not multiple versions of the same content has been indexed which could be a result of a spider trap

To determine whether or not search results on your website are being indexed you can use site:websiteurl.cominurl:insertanystringnormallycontainedinsearchurl

IIS Toolkit is based on Bing’s crawler technology. As such it often provides a better overview of how a search engine views a site than might be found using typical SEO crawlers such as Screaming Frog.

Log file analysis: Spider traps can be identified through analysis of web server log files. By using tools such as Splunk, AWStats or even Excel for small log files. Identifying where spiders such as Googlebot are spending most of their time and it’ll becomes clear where your crawl budget is being wasted(thanks to Ian Daniels & Scott McLay at Yard for sharing the last two tips)

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A spider trap (or crawler trap) is a set of web pages that may intentionally or unintentionally be used to cause a web crawler or search bot to make an infinite number of requests or cause a poorly constructed crawler to crash. Web crawlers are also called web spiders, from which the name is derived. Spider traps may be created to "catch" spambots or other crawlers that waste a website's bandwidth. They may also be created unintentionally by calendars that use dynamic pages with links that continually point to the next day or year.

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A spider trap is something webmasters should strive to avoid at all costs, as its essentially a death knoll to your site’s ability to be crawled and indexed, which in turn impacts negatively on overall organic visibility, rankings and ultimately, your site’s ability to generate revenue; it’s kind of a big deal when contextualised as such!

So, in order to ensure you have a solid understanding of the potential impact of a spider trap, it’s important that we give an overview of what a spider trap is, how to identify one and how to diagnose one, but before we weave that particular web (pardon the spidery pun!), let’s take a step back and understand the fundamental reason why any of this is important to us as website optimisers, business owners and marketers; it’s all down to the concept of crawl budget and how you can influence website performance in the context of maintaining crawl efficiency through effective URL management.

What is crawl budget and why is it important?

Google and the other search engines have invested significant capital in creating these wonderful search engines that have become ingrained in our day-to-day lives; gone are the days when we dusted off an old Encyclopaedia Britannica for authoritative answers to our daily queries or the innocent early-internet days of simply ‘Asking Jeeves’ and hoping he served us up a treat! Search engines are big business, and with SEO spend set to skyrocket to $80bn in the US alone by 2020, chances are, they’re here to stay, in one form or another.

With the ever-evolving Google algorithm at the forefront of evrything we in the SEO industry try to build our best practices around, it’s fair to assume that there’s a significant cost associated with Big G maintaining this vast, Rankbrain-driven beast. Needless to say, the bots/crawlers/spiders employed by Lord Googlebot to crawl our sites, index our content and ultimately, display them to our target audiences, cost money to run. Hosted within vast server networks dotted throughout the globe, there is a financial cost associated with physically providing the bandwidth expended by these spiders as they crawl through the web on a continual basis.

Fundamentally, if a website isn’t optimised to allow spider access to its infrastructure in an efficient manner, a spider will inevitably reach a point in time whereby it reaches its allocated bandwidth allowance for a given site and moves on the next website on its crawl schedule, rather than hanging around indefinitely on the same site, hope that it finds a way through a myriad of issues before coming out the other side with a coherent understanding of what it’s just scanned.

Naturally, if there’s been an issue whereby a spider couldn’t complete the task at hand and ceases crawling a site as crawl budget has been reached, then the affected site could in a sense be deemed ‘less than optimal’ in the eyes of the crawler and could in essence be downgraded (when it comes to ranking a site versus, say, a competitor site on which the crawler has no issues accessing) as a result.

Furthermore, if a website has serious crawl issues, then some very important product, category or informational pages may never see the light of day in the SERPs if a spider was unable to reach them to begin with.

To put a slightly weird personification around this concept, consider the following scenario:

You’re walking around a brand new multi-storey shopping centre, browsing through the first couple of shops, deciding which shops you like and might tell your friends about and also which ones you won’t want to visit again.

Then suddenly, just as you’re getting a feel for the place, the shutters come crashing down on the stores, you can’t go any further into this wonderful new shopping complex, the security guards block your path to entry and you have no idea what’s in the remaining shops or how you might spend your budget for the shopping trip you’ve planned.

Naturally, you make a beeline for the nearest exit, perhaps with a sour taste in your mouth, a little less likely to return, and still having no clue what’s beyond the shutters you reached so unexpectedly. You take your hard-earned cash to the neighbouring store, which welcomes you with open arms, meets all your shopping needs and you tell your friends all about how great this place is!

In this scenario (in case I've lost you already!), you are the crawler, the shops are the pages of a website and your friends are the SERPs; can you guess who played the role of the spider trap yet?! Those pesky shutters/security guards of course!

Crawl budget, in its purest definition, can be defined as the number of times a search engine crawler visits your website during a given timeframe, which is heavily influenced by its ease of navigation on a website. For example, if Googlebot typically visits your website approximately X times per month, we can assume with a good degree of confidence that that figure is your monthly crawl budget for Googlebot, although this is by no means set in stone.

It’s important to recognise that estimated crawl budget can evolve over time. Many other factors such as PageRank (the kind that Google still most definitely uses internally despite it being discontinued as a publicly-available toolbar metric) and server host load play a role in crawl budget too, as stated by former friend-to-SEOs, Matt Cutts in a revealing interview on the topic with Eric Enge a couple of years back.

A quick scan of your web logs or indeed via Search Console under ‘Crawl Stats’ will help you gain insight into what your average crawl budget for Google may be at a given point in time.

Here’s an example of what calculating estimated crawl budget looks like for our very own new spanky Wolfgang Digital website:

Looking at the above stats, if we take the daily average of 275*30 then we can deduce the average monthly crawl budget for this website from Google is 8250, meaning we now have an estimate of the number of pages we can expect Google to crawl, index and rank within a given timeframe.

If the number of crawlable assets (URLs) we want to rank for is significantly higher (or lower) than this amount, it typically means that we need to look further at crawl budget optimisation as a priority issues from a technical SEO perspective. Thankfully, we’re alright for now, but we regularly encounter scenarios in which websites are struggling with their web IA and oftentimes the root cause can be determined with a simple Screaming Frog crawl, configured to emulate Googlebot.

Bottom line is, if your site can't get indexed, it can't get ranked. Don’t let crawl budget play a part in how a spider treats your site, ensure you’re optimising to allow spiders enter your site, visits what’s important and exit the site left in no uncertain terms that you’ve pulled out all the stops to make it a smooth, logical experience for them.

What is a spider trap and how do I fix it?

A spider trap, as bluntly portrayed as an unreasonable security guard or inanimate shutter above, is basically what stands in the way of a spider accessing your website, having a lovely time in there and coming away with nothing but happy memories and some nice indexable pages to rank on SERPs versus the harsh reality of being trapped in a grim, never-ending loop of a section of your site which causes all sorts of trouble and eventually forces them to give up and move on due to pre-programmed bandwidth allowance limits.

Once you have access to the basic tools required in order to perfroma a site crawl, you're ready to commence your crawl analysis to determine whther a spider trap exists on your site.

They’re particularly prevalent on ecommerce sites due to the nature of large inventory management issues and fancy UX-led filtering configurations, but they can be found on pretty much any site with dynamically-served content. Big sites will naturally have more bandwidth allocated to it by search engine spiders, but that doesn’t mean they are less susceptible to being caught in a trap, on the contrary, if fact. Similarly, smaller sites can be equally effected by these issues if they’re not nipped in the bud at an early stage.

Sometimes, a trap is evident at a very early stage, with a loop kicking in with less than half the site crawled.

Here’s an example of a very early stage spider trap on a very small site, where the crawl hits the 8th asset and then loops back through URLs 1-7 before stumbling back over 8 at just 6.4% of crawl completion; this means a staggering 93.6% of this small website is not being crawled, indexed or ranked:

The following crawl completion index illustrates what a mid-stage spider trap looks like, the spiders have crawled a significant chunk of this large site bet can’t get any further, effectively leaving 2/5ths of this large ecommerce site ‘on the shelf’ in terms of potential web visibility:

Other times, it can kick in really late in the day, with almost the entire site crawled, yet the crawl will simply never end due to the crawler continually falling through the infinite loop inflicted by an intricate faceted navigation configuration or a simple coding error.

This can be particularly disheartening as just when you think the crawl is almost complete with only 161 URLs remaining from over 40k, it starts skipping back up around the 200 mark and never falls quite below the 100 mark towards completion.

This kind of trap will likely have less of an impact in the sense that the majority of the site has been crawled, but it’ll undoubtedly cause crawlers to look unfavourably on the site in question and perhaps reduce crawl budget to avoid running through similar issues in future crawls. Best not leave such things to chance in the hope that crawlers deem things ‘OK’ and will index most of what it’s found, we say let’s nip these traps in the bud and make crawl efficiency a non-issue once and for all!

There are four main causes of spider traps which we’ve encountered in recent times, each with varying degrees of complexity to both identify and diagnose; let’s begin with the simpler ones, moving through to the proper headache scenarios for us SEOs (not to mention the poor spiders, who I’m sure by now many of you are visualising as a hairy little Google-critter funnelling its way down the interweb towards your beloved domain!

If you’re more versed in using crawler tools then you may still have some burning questions such as ‘why will this crawl never end?’ or ‘why is smoke emanating from my brand new Lenovo?’; this guide should hopefully put your mind to ease and put you on the path towards an optimal crawler experience for all.

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Alekh Shah (1414110)

1. How to identify a crawler trap

The easiest place to identify potential traps in your seeds is from your Hosts report.

Especially high numbers of "Queued" URLs from any particular host can be an indication of a crawler trap.

2. What to look for in queued URLs

There are many types of crawler traps that you may encounter, such as wikis or forums containing infinite links for infinite types of viewing options, but we've identified a few of the more common ones you might see here.

Long messy strings:

http://www.example.org/-4RKgHfoN-6E11VCLhJOgPe79POuU2ZXhnTVbnUg_Zs.eyJpbnN0YW5jZUlkIjoiMTNkZDNmOTYtZTE1OC03NTU5LTEyMWMtZmM1YzE3MmQxMzk4Iiwic2lnbkRhdGUiOivZGUiOmZhbHNlLCJiaVRva2VIy…

Repeating Directories:

http://www.example.org/media/media/page/sites/css/html-reset.css

Extra Directories:

http://www.example.org/media/feed/pae/sites/all/themes/dev/custom/sites/all/themes/enviro-c4/css/html-reset.css

In most cases, large numbers of repeating directories or extra directories are a strong indication of a crawler trap.

Calendars:

http://www.example.org/calendar/events?&page=1&mini=2015-09&mode=week&date=2021-12-04

Calendar pages are not always a problem, but have the potential to generate URLs infinitely into the future and past.

3. How to prevent traps from being crawled

If you identify any traps in your Hosts report, you can block them from future crawls by using our web application's feature for limiting the scope of your crawls.

Most often, we recommend identifying a string of text that appears in all of your invalid/superfluous URLs and then applying a rule to block those specific URLs in future crawls

References: https://support.archive-it.org/hc/en-us/articles/208332943-Identify-and-avoid-crawler-traps-

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Spambots request webpages from a webserver several times within a short duration. So, to counter them, a spider trap catches spambots and makes them run in some infinite loop.

There are a number of common techniques that are frequently used to make the spambots run in an infinite loop. To name a few of them :

1.      Sometimes, a cyclic directory structure is used. For example : /path/to/directory/again/path/to/directory. As a result, if a spambot starts crawling the website, it will start running in an infinite loop.

2.      Some websites use unbounded number of dynamic pages. For example, algorithmically generated poetry or including a calendar.

3.      Webpages filled with a large number of characters so that when a lexical analyzer will try to parse it, it will end up crashing.

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There are four main types of common spider traps – each one looks different and requires varying methods of identification. They include:

1. Never-Ending URL: infinite different URLs that point to the same page with duplicated content.

2. Mix and Match Trap: the same information presented in endless different ways (e.g. millions of different ways to sort and filter a list of 1000’s of products).

3. Calendar Trap: pages that are technically unique, but provide no useful information (e.g. an event calendar that goes thousands of years into the future).

4. Session ID Trap: near-duplicates with pages that differ by some infinite detail.

References:-
https://www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/avoid-the-seo-spider-trap-how-to-get-out-of-a-sticky-situation/

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This is the step by step procedure for trapping a spider:
https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/field-guide-to-spider-traps-an-seo-companion.htm

These are various method which are easy to implement:

Robots.txt Files

NoIndex Tags

XML sitemaps

Avoid long dynamic URLs

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How to fix a keyword search spider trap

Add noindex, nofollow meta data to search result pages and get the site re-crawled, this should hopefully remove some the results from the search engine result pages. You also have the option of manually removing pages via Google Webmaster Tools

Once the site has been recrawled and the offending pages have dropped out of the index I like to block the pages via Robots.txt to prevent further crawling

In General,

Robots.txt Files

NoIndex Tags

XML sitemaps

Avoid long dynamic URLs

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A spider trap (or crawler trap) is a set of web pages that may intentionally or unintentionally be used to cause a web crawler to make an infinite number of requests or cause a poorly constructed crawler to crash.

Types of spider trap:

keyword Search trap

every website has a search function and often developers forget that these pages should not be crawled and indexed by search engines.  This leads to one of the most common, and potentially the worst, spider trap issues as it sometimes allows others to easily add indexable content to your website without even being logged in.

Dynamically inserted content spider trap

A dynamically inserted content spider trap is when you visit a URL that should 404 but returns a 200 OK status code and is similar to the keyword search spider trap

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Solving a spider trap can be a tricky thing. One such solution is to blocked it entirely with robots.txt. In other cases, we cannot do that as easily. For faceted navigation, you have to think long and hard about which facets you’d like Google to crawl and index.In general, there are three types of solutions:Block (a section of) the URLs with robots.txt.Add rel=nofollow and noindex,follow on specific subsets of links and pages and use rel=canonical wisely.Fix the trap by no longer generating endless amounts of URLs.In the case of the Guardian, we could simply prevent linking to dates where we had no articles. 

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Solving a spider trap can be a tricky thing. One such solution is to blocked it entirely with robots.txt. In other cases, we cannot do that as easily. For faceted navigation, you have to think long and hard about which facets you’d like Google to crawl and index.In general, there are three types of solutions:Block (a section of) the URLs with robots.txt.Add rel=nofollow and noindex,follow on specific subsets of links and pages and use rel=canonical wisely.Fix the trap by no longer generating endless amounts of URLs.In the case of the Guardian, we could simply prevent linking to dates where we had no articles. 

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They can be trapped using the fllowing :
1.Robot.txt files
2. No IndexTags
3.XML Sitemaps

More info on :
Link : https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/field-guide-to-spider-traps-an-seo-companion.htm

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1. Start a crawl of the site and let it run for a while.

2. If the crawl eventually finishes by itself, then there is no spider trap.

3. If the crawl keeps running for a very long time, then there might be a spider trap (or the site might just be very large).

4. Stop the crawl.

5. Export a list of URLs.

6. If you find a pattern where all of the new URLs look suspiciously similar to each other, then a spider trap is likely.

7. Spot-check a few of these suspiciously similar URLs in a browser.

8. If the URLs all return exactly the same page, then the site definitely has a spider trap.

9. If the URLs return pages that are technically slightly different, but contain the same basic information, then a spider trap is very likely.