Googlebot heavy traffic

Hello,
We have a dedicated server that host multiple Sites. Recently we’re dealing with heavy traffic on our server and after doing some inspection it turned out that our OJS site is receiving huge traffic from Google crawlers (Googlebots). I don’t understand why Googlebots are targeting OJS this much even though we haver multiple sites but our OJS site is the only site that receives unusual traffic from Googlebots.
Anybody had this issue? What triggers Googlebots to crawl OJS heavily like so? The image below shows the number of hits within 24 hours all of the traffic are coming from the IP 66.249.XX.XXX (Googlebots) targeting OBJ site.
WHM-host01-Terminal-110-0-33

OJS version: 3.3.0.17
PHP: 8.0

Kind regards,
Mohammed Kadhim

Hi,

is the majority of the User Agent strings using Googlebot or GoogleOther?

As we observe, many of the accesses go to the CitationStyleLanguage plugin URLs {ojsroot}/{journal}/citationstylelanguage/* . We let Googlebot crawl, but if traffic is too much for your site, you may consider blocking those URLs in robots.txt.

Hello @mpbraendle ,
Thanks for the info. But can you please elaborate what exactly is the purpose of crawling (…/citationstylelanguage/*) ? I mean what is the consequences if we block googlebots from crawling that URL?