How long before bots re-visit after they were told they are not allowed?

[boromir27]

I was dumb enough to block all robots but the biggest search engines. I saw Gigablast's robot and others were on a single-hit visit (most likely robots.txt), saw that they are not welcome and then went away. :(

Now I have changed my robots.txt into allowing all bots, instead blocking bad User-agents by force manually. Will Gigabot and others ever come back? If so, how long before they come back and see that they are now allowed in?

I feel so stupid for losing the traffic.

[Quadrille]

If you have links to your site, and good site navigation, they'll be back.

Just a matter of time, and that depends on all manner of unknowables.

But they'll be back - that's their job!

[margaretanne]

How long after the robots visit before the search engines include your site? I can see that several robots have visited in the past 24 hrs, but I am not listed on their search engines, I was visited by googlebot, yahoo slurp, msn media and a couple of unidentified ones....how long do I need to wait before resubmitting after changing?