Any non-human traffic that gets into your website is known as bot traffic. When most people hear about bot traffic, they immediately start having a negative connotation. Yet, not all bots are bad. What distinguishes between a good and a bad bot depends on the purpose of the bot.
Some bots are essential, and they offer valuable services like digital assistants and search engines. Most websites welcome these types of bots. But, some bots have malicious intent like credential stuffing, account takeover, and even DDoS attacks. When bad bots get into your website, they can be a nuisance since they will disrupt site analytics and generate click fraud.
Statistics show that 40% of all internet traffic is made by bots and a large part of these bots are bad bots. Thus, most organizations are looking for ways that they can manage the bots that come into their website. The article will discuss How to identify and block bot traffic.
Ways To Identify Bot Traffic
Identifying bots is not easy as they are getting smarter and are being more improved each day. Online business owners find themselves being caught between making sure their businesses reach more users and ensuring they do not get bad bot traffic into your website. Business owners need to make sure that the traffic they get into their website is human and not bots.
The question most business owners have is how they can know the presence of bots on the web traffic in the first place. Highlighted are some ways you can identify bots on your website.
- Increased Traffic Trend
When you create a website for your business, the aim is to see it grow and get much traffic into your website. But, this requires patients since website traffic does not develop overnight. Besides, you will need to put in some initiatives like improved SEO activities, paid search engine campaigns, marketing, improved content quality, and other activities that might draw traffic to your website for your website to grow. In case you see a spike in traffic and do not know the reason, you need to take a closer look into it.
- Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the number of users visiting your website and leaving without clicking anything on the page. If you notice that your bounce rate is high, it might result from bots getting into your website. In case you notice the bots getting into your website are doing so using a mechanically repetitive fashion, it might indicate that the bots have malicious intent.
- Change In Session Duration
The session duration is the time that users spend on a website. The session duration needs to be steady. In case you notice that the sessions have increased, then it might be an indication that bots have access to your website and are browsing for data at a low rate. Conversely, if the browsing rate is slow, it might mean that the bots are clicking through the pages on the site faster than any human would do.
- SEO Ranking
At times you might publish content on your website, and bots get this content and publish them elsewhere. If that happens, then it is going to impact your website ranking. In most cases, this situation takes place as soon as you post new content into your website. If fresh content is taken from your website and posted somewhere else, there is a high chance that the other website might outrank your site. The reason being your website might seem to publish plagiarized content and might appear to be dubious.
- Many Hits From One IP
Having one IP address accessing your website with various accounts is one of the ways you can use it to detect dubious activities. If you notice this, then it might be a sign that bots are accessing your websites. The bots could lead to the internet flooding your web server unless traffic, which might cause a DoS attack.
- How To Block Bot Traffic
In case you notice bot traffic once, then you need to stop it immediately. Bots are like viruses hitting your websites. They will get into your set system, steal data, and more. If you are looking for ways you can block bot traffic, here is what you should know.
- Legitimate Arbitrage
In case you are planning on buying traffic, you should only buy from reliable sources. The best way to do this is by practicing traffic arbitrage, which will help ensure you yield positive-based campaigns that will not compromise your website.
- Use robots.txt
Another way you can use to keep bots from crawling into your website is by using robotics.txt. It is paramount to ensure the crawler settings areas are needed to help prevent any issues that might arise with the AdSense ads. When you use this option, you will not have to worry about bots visiting or interacting with the web page altogether.
- DDOS
You can also prevent bots from getting into your website by using DDOS. When you connect with publishers, you will find that they have a list of offensive IP addresses that leverage DDOS protection. By doing this, you will get the safety of those visit requests on your website. The DDOS will offer protection to deny those visitor requests on their website.
- Use of CAPTCHA
Add CAPTCHA on sign-up or the download forms. Most of the publishers and premium websites can place CAPTCHA to confuse the bots. It is easy for a human to use capture, but it can be a challenge for the bots. Thus, they will not gain access to your website.
Conclusion
As your web traffic increases, so will the bots. It is paramount for you to have bot detection in place. But, bots are improving how they operate by increasingly imitating human technologies and behavior. Besides, they are distributed, making them difficult to identify. That is the reason you ought to be vigilant when protecting your website. It is best to use many options to safeguard your website and make it difficult for the bots to access. It is also ideal to have an expert working with you to ensure your website.