Jeson Clarke

Tips to Stop Bots From Infiltrating Your Website

Running a website can be a fun way to make a living or simply share your passion and experience with the world. Unfortunately, there's a hidden nuisance that plagues modern webmasters, and this nuisance can even turn dangerous if you're not careful. This nuisance is bot traffic, and identifying bot traffic before it has a chance to negatively impact your website is a crucial component in protecting your brand on the Internet.

Whether you're new to running websites or you're a seasoned pro who is looking for relief from invasive and bothersome bot behavior, below are some tips to get rid of robots and regain your peace of mind:

Use a CAPTCHA Script

One simple way to help in identifying bot traffic and thwarting its efforts is to use a completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart (CAPTCHA) script. These scripts generate a challenge-response test that is designed to stop bots because bot traffic isn't able to decipher test challenges.

A common example of a CAPTCHA script is one that generates a series of images and then asks a website visitor to identify specific objects in the images before proceeding. A human can usually pass these tests with ease, but bot traffic will be more likely to be deterred since a scripted robot won't be able to tell the images apart.

Block Proxy Services

A proxy service is a service that makes web traffic appear like it is coming from one source when it is actually coming from another. Bot networks often employ proxy services in an attempt to hide the location of the network accessing or attacking a website.

You can find lists online of known and popular proxy services. With this information, you can block access to your site from these services through your site's back-end administration controls.

Edit Your Robots.txt File

HTML files on websites are crawled by robots every single day. In fact, this is one way that search engines index pages to generate results when someone searches for a particular subject.

You can make adjustments to your robots.txt file to block access to robots. In doing this, you can stop bot traffic, but keep in mind that this may also block search engines from indexing your site, therefore affecting your page rank in search engine results pages.

Author Resource:-

Jeson Clarke writes about technologies, import/export data and customs data tools. You can find his thoughts at BI reporting tools blog.