Malicious bots create a massive number of issues for businesses. From hacking and stealing credit card numbers to buying up in-demand tickets and merchandise, they cost companies millions yearly. Rate-limiting tools like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) effectively block lousy traffic. However, they could be more foolproof, as attackers can bypass them using proxy servers and IP rotation.
Monitor Your Traffic
Malicious bots can cause all sorts of problems for your business. They can suck up bandwidth and drain your servers, slowing your site and hurting performance. They can skew analytics, making you appear lower in search results and making your content hard to find. They can also steal data, images, and content. And they can spoof your website to mimic human behavior, resulting in ad fraud that costs you money. The good news is that monitoring your traffic can help you spot bad bots and stop BOT traffic. You can look for anomalies like an unexpected traffic spike or a page with a very high bounce rate. You can use analytics tools to look for suspicious referrers or IP addresses and block them accordingly. You can also use challenge-based bot detection, which looks for a signature of behavior different from human behavior. You can use device fingerprinting to detect emulators and other hardware bots. However, these techniques are not foolproof, and it’s essential to have a complete solution that protects exposed APIs and your web applications, identifies different types of bots, and mitigates fresh attacks in real time.
Reverse Lookup IP Addresses
Non-Human Traffic (NHT) is the term given to any online activity that a human doesn’t generate. From basic bots used for data scraping and website crawling to sophisticated bots that mimic human behavior to evade detection, this type of traffic can cause significant damage to your business. It can lead to inflated traffic, decreased profits, and even hacks that impact your site’s security. The good news is that identifying bad bots isn’t hard to do. Look for red flags like a sudden increase in views or a high bounce rate, especially from suspicious locations. You can also use a reverse IP address lookup tool to verify the authenticity of an IP. Almost half of all bad bots originate from the U.S. Additionally, many use proxies to bypass IP blocks. This makes it challenging to eliminate this threat using geofencing alone, as malicious bots will continue to evolve their attack methods. However, you can combat these threats by implementing several effective strategies to eliminate bots from your site.
Optimize Your Site
Bad bots damage your business in several ways:
- They create an extra load on your servers that you must pay for in bandwidth and cloud resources.
- They skew your analytics.
- They cost you money on fraudulent advertising charges.
- They steal personal data from users and can even lead to denial of service attacks.
They also damage your reputation, tarnish search engine rankings, and slow your website load for real users. Regularly checking your server logs and observing user behavior patterns can help you identify bot traffic. For example, an unusually high session duration indicates that a bot crawls your site much faster than a human. A sudden increase in sessions from a specific geographic region indicates bot activity. You can use tools to optimize your site, such as reducing the size of images and removing unnecessary JavaScript. You can also reduce your HTTP requests by reducing the data sent with each request. This will decrease your load time and improve your website’s security.
Optimize Your Content
Bad bots are typically programmed for malicious activities like data scraping, credential stuffing, hacking, and click fraud. However, some bots like e-commerce, search engine indexing, and website monitoring are designed for more benign purposes. Despite their positive uses, bot traffic can negatively impact the performance of a website or app. Excessive bot traffic degrades analytics, skews data, and harms SEO and PPC efforts. Some common indicators of lousy bot traffic include high bounce rates, unexpectedly low conversion rates, and sudden changes in your analytics.
You can also detect bad bots by examining the source of your traffic. For example, if your traffic suddenly comes from an unknown IP address or domain, it is likely caused by a bot. Another essential thing to look for is an unusual spike in your page views or website activity.
Monitor Your Analytics
The most effective way to detect bots is through a tool designed for integrated web analytics. This will provide a comprehensive overview of your website traffic, including human visitors and bots. If you notice an unexpected and unexplained spike in page views, this is a sign that bots are clicking on the site. This kind of traffic can also cause an abnormally high bounce rate. Malicious bots often visit websites to steal contact information, test logins and passwords, create phishing accounts, or execute DDoS attacks. This type of bot traffic can also harm SEO by slowing down a website’s performance and decreasing search engine rankings. There are several ways to identify bots, including signature-based detection, device fingerprinting, and anomaly detection. These methods will help you to identify and block bots in real time. In addition, you can use rate limiting to frustrate bots by preventing them from making repeated requests. This will cause them to move on to another website that can’t be as quickly blocked. It will also prevent your website from being used to conduct DDoS attacks.
