How to Get Rid of Fake Bot Traffic - Edtech Official Blog

Who doesn’t want to see a rise their website traffic? Guess everyone. It is actually a relief which means that your strategy is delivery results and that you are heading towards the right direction. But these days some vulnerable sources are proving to be a in this traffic. These sources are termed as bad bots. SEO Experts at Edtech are giving you a detailed explanation about what exactly bots are and how do you shield your website from them.

Clear Definition of Bot

A bot, also known as a robot, is actually a software application which has been designed & developed with the objective of accomplishing the automated tasks assigned online. The tasks of bots are typically repetitive which makes them faster as compared to the humans. Bots being robotic in nature are more efficient and speedy in nature.

What makes Bots Good or Harmful?

The bots are actually developed with the purpose of crawling, indexing of the internet sources & search engines. But in the world of Digital Marketing Services, there is always a good side and a bad side. Same happens with bots as they have taken to the dark side. If we especially talk about the bad bots, these are designed just to spread maliciousness in the virtual world. It includes malware, increasing artificial harmful traffic, fraud clicks and collecting email addresses over the internet for the purpose of suspicious activities. Let us have a look over the different types of bad bots –

Spambots

These are the bots used with the intention of accumulating as many as possible email addresses in order to target Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). This is the reason why most of the users these days tend not to link their email IDs in the HTML format but prefer to use it like “abc at gmail dot com”. However, there are some bots which break the barrier of CAPTCHA protection and fills out the form easily.

There are some bots that spam without collecting the emails. These bots work with the motto of attacking straight away to the servers so that these can enter in the thousands of websites each day. With this, bots send the HTTP requests with a fake designed referrer header. Such fake headers are designed & distribute in order to hide the identity of bots. This works exactly the same way that the spammers wish like the way they want clicks.

Smart Spam Bots

This is a type of bot which is designed to send fake traffic without even going to a website. This happens when HTTP request gets generated by the bots from a Google Analytics tracking code using the website Id as well. In fact, these smart spam bots not just send the artificial traffic but also send the unsafe fake referrers. The referrer website looks exactly the original one which might make you forced to click. With the help of the plugins, you can filter out the bots with a 403 Forbidden Message and avoid them from coming to your analytics of Google.

Botnet

Botnet means robotic network. It is basically a network of computers that communicate with the other bot partners in order to execute the commanded task. Its location can be local as well as globally across the world. Interestingly, whenever a spam bot meets the botnet, it gets the advantage of gaining access to the entire network of IP addresses. Afterward they start attacking the internet with its weapons like scareware, fast flux, fraud click, email spamming, spyware, adware, DDOS etc. This eventually confuses the owners of the websites with illicit traffic.

Best way to detect spam sources

You can detect the spam sources by checking the referral reports placed in the Google Analytics account. Now start sorting the report by bouncing rate in its descending order. Now locate referrers if any with 0% or 100% bounce rate. If you doubt that any of the website coming in the list is spam then try to find out the more information on Google. Once you get confirmed that these are the bad bots then block them coming towards your website.

Easiest way to protect your website from spam bots

Now you are confirmed that these were the bots and even you have blocked them but what’s next? If you are continuously finding the spam bots in Google Analytics then the best way to block them is via .htaccess. This should be done with complete attention and precaution as your minor mistake can bring your site down.

However, you can also block the bots straight away in Google analytics. Even for the WordPress, you can use some special plugins such as GM block bot to stop spambots to enter to your website. It needs no hard and fast rule like setting up. In fact, the results were pretty satisfied after implementing this technique.