Bots - we all are familiar with them. If you are running a website, you should know what bots are, how they work and how they can discover and disturb your site. Learn how to protect your site’s speed, users, and security by putting some defense to block bots from entering your website.

What Are Bots?

A bot is a computer program or a software script that operates as an agent for a user or program to perform a task over and over again. You may know these bots by different names, say crawlers, spiders or web bots. Unlike the conventional embodiment of a robot, these bots are scripted and run continuously over the data of websites or other online platforms.

Are All Bots Bad for Website?

Bots constitute more than half of the web traffic. And these bots are multipurpose- good bots as well as malicious bad bots with harmful intent. Good bots get your site indexed to help you reach your potential customers, while bad bots bestow damage to your site and business. However, good bots can overburden your server resources if not managed properly. It can affect the traffic load on the site, thus affecting the site speed. Technically, good bots are powered by legitimate owners and are visible, while bad bots act like humans to mislead and can infect any device malware to put under threat.

How Bots Can Be Bad for Your Website?

Malicious attackers design these bad bots impact any online business. These bots work using artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning technology. E-commerce brands use chatbots these days to facilitate human interaction and provide a better customer service experience.

Data Theft

We notice thousands of data theft cases every day. Content scraper bots rob your content without your consent and use your sensitive data to expose you to legal penalties to defame you. Some  bots collect users’ credit card information if find a breach. These bots can potentially affect the speed by burdening your server. A slow website or page will drive away the visitor and your search engine result page appearance.

Website Spoofing

It’s a real-time problem that businesses face due to bots. Spoofing is done by replicating a real and legitimate website to forge and deceive you. All this is done to trick users, gain their confidence and get access to enter the system and steal data is Website spoofing. The imitation is done deeply- from domain name to layout, branding, user interface, etc., to drop malware onto your computer. This is usually done by creating an email that links to the illegitimate website.

Fraud Links from Spambots 

Spambots affect all the user-generated inputs on your website by spamming the forms, comment sections, and other areas on your website/platform. While doing so, they integrate fraud/scam websites that may ruin the reputation and get your website penalized by the search engine. These bots may disrupt your site’s activities by increasing the overall traffic if attended by a spammy bot and will affect your advertising campaign. At its core, the surge in online interaction may flood your page with unsolicited comments and other bot activities to create spam.

How Do Bots Work?

Traffic that comes on a website from an automated software program is bot traffic. This traffic is faux traffic and is used for testing purposes or malicious activities. This traffic can create a problem for website owners and especially when Bot detection becomes difficult.

What Bot Traffic Actually Do?

• Decelerate Your Site Speed
• Spam your Site with Fraud Links
• Ruin your Branding
• Steal Sensitive Data
• Drive Your Real Visitors Away

How to Check for Bot Traffic?

Whether it’s a real human or a bot, the truth is really hard to establish. Even these bots use the legitimate IP address to imitate, like real users, copy their fingerprints/signatures, and use legitimate information from a consistent browser header and OS data to feign like one. To identify the Bot traffic, you can simply:

• If you find excessive commenting on your site pages or blog pages
• If these comments look similar or unreadable or non-human, these can be bots
• Those comments with unnecessary and excessive linking or obvious spam are by bots
• If you notice a sudden surge in bounce rate on a particular page, the bot is the reason
• The increase in sign-ups for your newsletter or other forms is due to bots
• Unsolicited email sign-ups that appear to be non-human
• Frequent log-in attempts from unknown sources
• Other peculiar activities

In case you spot any of these activities, know that it’s the right time to block the bots. AI is playing a supreme role in marketing. While doing so, you might notice some unusual activity due to the presence of bots. In case you notice that web bots are bothering your website, investigate a bit to find out the source and ways to block bots.

Tips to Block Bots from Entering Your Website

Bots are invisible guests that you want to escape but couldn’t. Any suggested solutions will need a proactive approach and insight ahead of the problem. At first, you have to analyze the enemy, fix the issue and create a shield for such invasions in the future.

Basic Site Cleanup

What’s happening on your website will help you understand how to block website bots. Is it a sudden increase in the activities or some other severe issue that you are facing? Analyze what impact it can make on your marketing efforts – good, bad or neutral. Seeing a sudden spike in activities without any reason on a given day on your website will allude to the bot traffic or invasion. In case, you find your e-commerce site infected or hacked, go through your site periodically to give it a cleanup. Keep it light– tweak code to make it light, optimize images, check for broken links, get rid of unnecessary files and data, and clean your database, eliminate unused tags, review the content, and manage spam links on comments and clear out unneeded themes and plugins.

Find the Source

Now that you know that web bots have visited you, it’s time to discover their entry source, only then you can find how to cure them. Analyze the traffic on your website by visiting the Google Analytics - log-in attempt emails or logs to get the data of whosoever has visited you. Notice the repetitive activities as bots do it in a repeated way, and the bot traffic will most likely be from the same IP address or similar pattern. Once you discover the origin of bots and how they are attacking your site, reach out to SEO Company in Noida to fix it instantly.

Plan It Out

Since you have Bot traffic hit, it’s time to decide how to stop bots from doing further damage. Patching the damages or preparing for future invasions can avoid all the vulnerabilities. Traffic coming from automated software is hard to eschew. You may need an effective bot mitigation solution every second due to the growing strain on IT staff and resources. Since advanced bots mimic human behavior, traditional cyber security tools fail to overcome their invasion. To control abusive traffic, you need to implement the latest tools and technology with the help of a renowned website development company to prevent such attacks.

Stay Up to Date

Having an up-to-date website with all integrated the latest technologies may make it difficult for traffic bots to bypass. Pay attention to public data breaches using the latest technology, as older versions can allow the bots to gain access. With this, you might get access to bot blocker options and increased security features. If you find any of the bots coming to your website, you can block that IP address to not gain access to your website anytime.

Add CAPTCHA

Protect your site from spam and abuse or block bots from entering your website by adding CAPTCHA on everything, including sign-ups, contact pages, and purchase options. Only humans should be able to crack this CAPTCHA since bots can’t perform the desired action.

Keep an eye on APIs

API integrations and connections to other web platforms may exist if you are using an older website. In case the integration is permitted to share data with your website, APIs could get access to your data to make it prone to data theft. Check all the = APIs and plug-ins for bots traffic. Remove the obsolete ones and get the latest versions. Make the rest of all secure.

Conclusion

If you notice any instant bot traffic infringement, hire a professional SEO executive to dive deep into it and block a bot that may get in way of your success.