How to Block Bad Bots for Website Security?

You will be surprised to know that more robots visit our website and blog than human visitors. These bots are both good and bad. Bad bots affect the SEO of your site. In today’s article, we will talk about the effect of bad bots on website SEO and how they can be blocked.

These bad bots are so dangerous that due to them the search ranking of your website also decreases. Not only this, many types of it 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 this in a little detail,

What are Bad Bots

An Internet bot is a software application that performs automated tasks on the Internet. They are also called online bots, web robots, robots, and simply bots.

In general, bots perform simple and repetitive tasks that are difficult and time-consuming, or even impossible for humans. For example, crawling websites.

Every search engine uses bots to collect data to develop its search index. But at the same time, hackers also use bots for malicious purposes.

That is why they are mainly divided into two parts,

• Good or SEO bots
• Bad or Malicious Bots

SEO bots or good bots are those which help websites to appear in search engines and are beneficial in creating the required visibility of sites on the internet.

Bad bots are a group of programs designed primarily to launch automated attacks by hackers or competitors. Bad bots steal your unique content and information, as well as promote spam.

How Bat Bots Affect Website SEO?

There are many ways in which bots can have a negative impact on your website SEO. some of which are as follows,

1. Web Scraping

Scraper bots are specifically programmed to steal content and then duplicate it on other websites.

These bots steal the content of your website and create the problem of duplicate content, which worsens the ranking of your website pages in the search engines.

2. Form Spamming

Form spam bots are made to submit forms to a website to bring down the website with fake leads.

These bots practice creating 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 do your business by reducing customer visits and conversions on your website.

These bots are designed to do price scraping and steal pricing data from the website. These are there to maintain pricing for your competitor.

4. Skewed Analytics

These bots are created to affect the main website analytics. This creates problems for the IT, Marketing, Analysis team.

Most of these votes affect large business websites, whose analytics reports are tarnished and they downgrade their business with the wrong metrics.

5. Automated Attacks

These bots are made to perform various types of auto-attacks. These websites pose a serious web security risk to brands.

Because of them, the search traffic of blogs falls and the website has problems like account takeover, credential stuffing, and inventory exhaustion.

How to Detect Bad Bots?

To identify bad bots, you have to use hosting like Cloudways, which has provided a monitoring service.

Also, apart from this, if you ever use a CDN service like Cloudflare, these user agents, countries, paths, etc. Shows other reports.

You will get to know robots in its User-Agent section, you can block them by detecting bad bots.

Or if you search “bad bots list” in Google, you will get a list of popular bad bots. But the method of analysis is better for which bots are attacking our site.

How to Block Bad Bots?

By now you must have understood how bad bots affect your website and you have to block them to avoid their attacks.

Normally we robots.txtuse for this. But there are many other ways to block them, which I am explaining in detail here.

1. Block bad bots via origin server

You can block bad bots through your web server. Here I tell you the method of both Apache .htaccess and Nginx web servers.

Block bad bots via .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(agent1|Cheesebot|Catall Spider).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Or you can also use BrowserMatchNoCase directive like this,

BrowserMatchNoCase "agent1" bots
BrowserMatchNoCase "Cheesebot" bots
BrowserMatchNoCase "Catall Spider" bots

Order Allow,Deny
Allow from ALL
Deny from env=bots

Block bad bots via Nginx:

if ($http_user_agent ~ (agent1|Cheesebot|Catall Spider) ) {
return 403;
}

2. Block bad bots via robots.txt

This is the simplest and easiest way to block bad bots. Most people use this method. For this, you have to use a user agent.

User-agent: bots name
Disallow: /

For example, if you want to block semrushbot then you will use code like this.

User-agent: semrushbot
Disallow: /

In the same way, you can block other bad bots through robots.txt.

3. Block bad bots via CDN

If you use content delivery networks like Cloudflare, KeyCDN, then you can also block bad bots through them.

For this on Cloudflare, you have to use the following firewall rule.

Go to Cloudflare Firewall >> Firewall Rules and click on Create a Firewall rule button and create a rule in the following way

• Field: User-Agent
• Operator: contains
• Value: bots name

After this, the setting has to be saved by selecting the block in action. For example, if you want to block SemrushBot, you will add SemrushBot instead of bots name.

If you want, you can use the following expression code.

(http.user_agent contains "SemrushBot")

I will tell you about this in more detail in the future.

Also Read: What is Googlebot and How does it Work?

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 any information, if you want to know anything more about this, then you can ask in the comment section below, all possible help will be given to you.