One of the most important things that need your attention on the internet is your security and safety. Because of a large number of security breaches, such as Yahoo’s concerns about state-sponsored privacy invasions, issues of GCHQ and NSA, as well as state-sponsored hacking cases, we need to take security seriously. It is important that we expect and plan the right things at the right time to ensure our online safety. We should not forget that we live in a world where things are free to use and can be hacked within seconds. Malicious activities have become a common part of our lives, and we have to focus on our defense from the external forces. Here, Ross Barber, the SemaltCustomer Success Manager, is going to tell you about how to detect and block bad bots.
What are Bad Bots?
There are two different kinds of bots: good bots and bad bots. It would not be wrong to say that the good bots do not harm your website, but the bad bots always create problems. Some of the benefits of bots are that they improve your website ranking in the search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Also, they provide us with useful services as they make our content available on the internet to a lot of people based on its keywords and search engine queries. However, the bad bots can damage your website to a great extent. They are used in a variety of ways, and hackers scrap websites for information that is likely to be used by your competitors. Moreover, the bad bots create distributed denial-of-service attacks and can steal or repost your web content, creating copies of it on the internet. Inflating search engine traffic is all the result of bad bots, effecting and distorting the metrics of your website. The bad bots might increase your website traffic, but the loading speed and bounce rate also increase. Regardless of the types of bots, you must get rid of both of them to minimize your risks of getting destroyed on the internet.
How Can You Identify and Stop Them?
You can identify and prevent both good and bad bots by installing compatible plugins, tools as well as extensions. You should rely on hosting and solution providers and look for the proactive ways to get rid of them. Before you do anything, you would have to establish a setup to evaluate whether the bot is good or bad and how to prevent it within minutes. A report by CMSWire reveals that more than seventy percent of it can be removed with evasion techniques like rotating IP addresses and low-frequency attacks.
Homegrown Solutions
One of the easiest ways to get rid of bots is by blocking the IP addresses of all bots, whether they are good or bad. You would have to observe the type of bot before performing any action. Use web server directives to get them blocked. You may block as many IP addresses as you want, based on your observations and evaluation. Just make sure that you don’t block IP addresses of the humans because this can ruin your site’s reputation on the internet.
