If the robots.txt allows certain general directories but blocks specific heavy folders, the feature automatically configures the scraping speed.
Would you like a technical breakdown of how to ethically monitor Tabelog changes without violating their robots.txt ?
For SEOs: Tabelog will rank for restaurant names anyway, because user behavior (searching “Sushi Tokyo Tabelog”) overrides crawl directives. But for anyone wanting structured data at scale? The robots file says everything you need to know: “No.”
/rvw/ (reviews) and /photo/ (user-uploaded images) are fully disallowed. Why? Because Tabelog’s value is user-generated trust. If Google indexed every review page, scrapers could steal structured opinions and star ratings without ever touching the site. Blocking them doesn’t stop determined scrapers, but it raises the bar.
Understanding the file is essential for anyone looking to crawl Japan’s largest restaurant review platform. This plain text file serves as a "gentlemen’s agreement" between the website owners and automated bots, outlining which parts of the site are open for exploration and which are strictly off-limits. What is Tabelog's robots.txt?