“Can anyone offer some insight on the Baiduspider bot and what, if anything, can or should be done to deny it access to my site?”
Baidu should be denied access to your server and below is a suggestion of
what you should do.
If your web server is Apache, you can return a ‘403 Forbidden’ error message by
editing your .htaccess file in the root of your server path. e.g.
Order allow,deny
Deny from 119.63.192.0/21
Deny from 123.122.0.0/20
Deny from 220.181.0.0/16
Allow from all
Even better, if you have PHP on your web server, is to make Baidu wait
up to 999 seconds for a page request.
See: http://gelm.net/How-to-block-Baidu-with-PHP.htm