Crawler policy

PasalBot

PasalBot is the crawler that powers pasal.biz, a product search engine for Nepal. This page documents how we identify ourselves, what we fetch and don't fetch, and how to control whether your shop appears in the index.

Updated 2026-05-22

At a glance

User-Agent: PasalBot/1.0 (+https://pasal.biz/bot)
robots.txt: respected. User-agent: PasalBot directives are honoured, as is the wildcard User-agent: *.
What we fetch: publicly accessible product pages, sitemaps, and structured product feeds.
What we don't fetch: anything behind a login, customer data, order history.
Contact: [email protected]

What PasalBot does

PasalBot fetches publicly available product information from Nepali shops so shoppers can search products across many shops in one place on pasal.biz. When a shopper finds a product, we forward them to the shop's own website to complete the purchase — pasal.biz does not sell anything itself. For the buyer-side framing, see the post Search Nepali products in one place.

How to control whether we crawl your site

Option 1 — Use robots.txt

PasalBot honours robots.txt. To block us entirely, add the following to https://yourshop.com.np/robots.txt:

User-agent: PasalBot
Disallow: /

To block a specific path while allowing the rest:

User-agent: PasalBot
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /cart/

To slow us down rather than block:

User-agent: PasalBot
Crawl-delay: 10

PasalBot picks up robots.txt changes on its next visit. The wildcard User-agent: * rule applies to PasalBot too, so if you've already blocked all crawlers you've already blocked us.

Option 2 — Email us

Send an email from the address listed on your shop's website to [email protected] with the subject "Delist my shop" and a link to your business page on pasal.biz (or the shop's website URL). We'll remove the listing and stop re-crawling. Email is the right channel if you want a clean, immediate removal without editing your site's configuration.

How to claim a listing instead

If you'd rather take control of the listing than remove it, email [email protected] with the subject "Claim my shop", from an email address on your shop's website. Include your shop's name and the pasal.biz business page URL. We verify ownership and transfer the listing to your pasal.biz account, so you can edit the profile, choose the sync cadence, hide individual products, and trigger a manual re-sync after a big catalog change. Claiming is free; we don't take a commission on traffic.

Going further — connecting a product feed (WooCommerce, Shopify, Google Merchant, CSV) so updates flow automatically — is documented in connect an existing e-commerce site to pasal.biz.

How to verify a request is really PasalBot

Anyone can set a User-Agent header to "PasalBot" — that alone is not proof. To verify a request really came from us:

Take the request's IP address from your server log.
Do a reverse DNS lookup (PTR) on that IP.
Confirm the hostname is under pasal.biz.
Do a forward DNS lookup on that hostname and confirm it resolves back to the original IP.

If any step fails, the request is not from PasalBot. Suspected impostors can be safely blocked at your firewall.

What PasalBot does not do

We do not crawl pages that require a login. We do not have credentials for your shop, and we do not try to obtain them.
We do not submit forms, add items to carts, or interact with checkout flows.
We do not store payment information, customer accounts, or order history — none of that is reachable from a public product page.
We do not impersonate browsers to evade detection. The User-Agent above is the only one we send.
We do not sell or resell scraped data to third parties. The index is for shopper search on pasal.biz.

Reporting a problem

If PasalBot has fetched something it shouldn't have, is consuming too much bandwidth, or appears to be misbehaving, email [email protected] with the subject "PasalBot problem" and include relevant log lines (timestamp, path, IP if you have it). We'll investigate and update this page if any policy changes.