How to block bad bots for website security?
You will be surprised to know that on our website and blog, robot visitors are more than human visitors. These bots are both good and bad. Bad bots affect the SEO of your website in many ways. Today in this article, I will discuss how bad bots affect the website SEO and how to block bad bots for website security.
These bad bots are so dangerous, that because of them the search ranking of your website also decreases. Not only this, there are many types of websites that affect your website.
We all know that Google and all other search engines use bots to crawl our website. Similarly, hackers also use bots for site infrastructure. Let us understand it in a little detail.
What are Bad Bots?
An Internet bot is a software application that performs automated tasks on the Internet. These are also called online bots, web robots, robots and simply bots.
In common, bots perform simple and repetitive tasks that are difficult and time-consuming or impossible for humans. For example, crawling the websites.
Each search engine uses bots to collect data to develop its search index. But at the same time, hackers also use bots for putting malicious codes on websites.
That is why they are mainly divided into two sections.
Types of Bots for Websites
- SEO bots or Good bots
- Bad Bots or Malicious Bots
SEO bots or good bots are those that help websites to enter search engines and are beneficial in creating the necessary visibility of sites on the Internet.
Bad bots are a group of programs designed primarily to launch automatic attacks by hackers or competitors. Bad bots steal your content and information, as well as promote spam.
How does the Bat Bots affect website SEO?
There are many ways that bots can negatively impact your website’s SEO. I am explaining a few below.
1. Web Scraping bots/ Scraper bots
Scraper bots are specifically programmed to steal content and then duplicate it on other websites.
These bots can create the problem of duplicate content by stealing/copying the content of your website to another. This can cause the ranking of your website pages in the search engines to get deteriorate.
2. Form Spamming
Form spam bots are created to submit forms to a website with fake leads on a website.
These bots practice making thousands of low-quality backlinks for the website, due to which your website can also be blacklisted by Google.
3. Price Scraping
Price scrape bots try to harm your business by reducing customer visits and conversions on your website.
These bots are created for price scraping and stealing pricing data from the website. These are to maintain pricing for your competitor.
4. Skewed Analytics
These bots are created to affect main website analytics. This creates a problem for the IT, Marketing, Analysis team.
Mostly these bots affect the big business websites, whose analytics report is spoiled and they drop their business from the wrong matrix.
5. Automated Attacks
These bots are made to perform various types of auto-attacks. These websites pose a serious web security risk for brands.
Due to them, the search traffic of blogs falls and the website has problems like account takeover, credential stuffing, and inventory exhaustion.
How to find or detect Bad Bots on your website?
To identify bad bots you should always use a good hosting service, which provides bots monitoring services.
Additionally, you can use CDN services like Cloudflare, StackPath, KeyCDN, etc. These services provide reports and information about user agents, countries, paths, etc. So, you can always be informed.
You will get to know the robots in its User-Agent section; you can block them by detecting bad bots from them.
Or if you search for “bad bots list” in Google, you will get a list of popular bad bots. But the analysis method is better to detect what kind of bad bots are attacking your website.
How to Block Bad Bots or remove Bad bots from your website?
By now you must have understood how bad bots affect your website and you have to block to avoid their attacks.
Generally, we use robots.txt for this. But there are many other ways to block them, which I am going to explain in detail below.
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1. Block bad bots by the origin server
You can block bad bots through your web server. Here let me tell you the method of both Apache .htaccess and Nginx web server.
Block bad bots via .htaccess:
.htaccess is a hidden file with .htaccess and no name used on the webserver running Apache. These .htaccess files are used to change the configuration of the Apache Web Server software to enable/disable added functionalities that the Apache Web Server software offers. Do Block bad bots via .htaccess, add the code below in the file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(agent1|Cheesebot|Catall Spider).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Or you can also use the “BrowserMatchNoCase” directive like this,
BrowserMatchNoCase "agent1" bots
BrowserMatchNoCase "Cheesebot" bots
BrowserMatchNoCase "Catall Spider" bots
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from ALL
Deny from env=botsBlock bad bots via Nginx:
Nginx is an open-source HTTP Web server and reverses the proxy server. To block bad bots via Nginx, simply add these lines of codes.
if ($http_user_agent ~ (agent1|Cheesebot|Catall Spider) ) {
return 403;
}2. Block bad bots by using robots.txt
This is the easiest and easiest way to block bad bots. Most people use this method. For this, you have to use user-agent.
User-agent: bots name
Disallow: /For example, if you want to block AhrefsBot, then you will use code like this.
User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /In the same way, you can block other bad bots through robots.txt.
3. Block bad bots via CDN Services
If you use a content delivery network like Cloudflare, KeyCDN, then you can block bad bots through them as well.
To block bad bots on Cloudflare you need to add the following firewall rule.
Go to Cloudflare Firewall >> Firewall Rules and click on Create a Firewall rule button and create rules in the following way.
- Field: User-Agent
- Operator: contains
- Value: name of the bot (like AhrefsBot or SEMrushBot, etc)
After this, select the block in action and save the setting. For example, if you want to block AhrefsBot, then you will add AhrefsBot instead of bots name.
If you want, you can use the following expression code.
(http.user_agent contains "AhrefsBot")Conclusion
In this way, you can block bad bots and protect your website’s SEO ranking from being affected by bots.
Hope you have liked some information, if you want to know more about it, you can ask in the comment section below, all possible help will be given to you.
Bit too much for me!!@???