Not all visits made to your website are humanely done. In fact, a significant percentage of requests made to your website and its content originates from bots and other types of automation. The constant increase in automated related malignant traffic results in an expensive and unbearable burden on your security team and resources.
However, prior to determining how to lockout bots from your site, it is essential to ask yourself a few critical questions regarding your website and the needs of your business. This guide will not only help you to learn how to prevent bots from getting into your site but, more essentially, discover techniques to lockout bots from your website.
So, how can you distinguish bots from regular users?
By the look, a visit from a typical user and a bot may seem virtually alike. More often than not, bots contain an IP address, browser, header data, and other apparently recognizable information, making it pretty challenging to distinguish them from regular users. However, bots can be unmasked through the collection and reviewing of comprehensive analytics and other request information.
This process is tedious and intricate, and therefore it needs to be concluded before arriving at a decision on how to lockout bots from a website. It’s worth noting that not all bots are bad, as some are very fundamental to your website.
So, what is the difference between good bots and bad bots?
Now that you have learned how to segregate regular traffic from bot traffic, you can go a step further to determine which bots are valuable and which are malicious. Good bots comprise social media crawlers and search engine crawlers.
Typically, you don’t want to lock out good bots from accessing your website because they aid humans in locating and visiting your website.
Bad bots comprise any bots that are devised for malignant purposes. These bots aim to bring your online business down through schemes such as constant web scraping, competitive data mining leading to brownouts, account hijacking, and ultimately brute force attacks.
Being informed on how to distinguish bots coming to your site allows you to act on malicious bots while allowing good bots to access your website.
What Are the Bad Boats Aiming For?
Bots are designed to aim at certain website elements, such as content, account credentials, and more. The extent of the damage caused by the bots can stretch beyond the targeted elements of a website. Therefore, if not careful, a competitor can plot your downfall by directing endless automated bots to your website, making it inoperable. Therefore it is necessary to take the proper steps to safeguard your website from invasion by bad bots.
That said, let’s look at the ultimate techniques to block bad bots from a website.
The most accessible means of locking out bad bots from any website entails blacklisting individual IP addresses or whole IP ranges. However, this methodology is laborious, time-consuming, and impractical when involving voluminous IP addresses. This is because automated bots are capable of cycling through thousands of IP addresses in no time, meaning they will adopt a different IP address in a short time after they are blocked.
In addition, you can review specific requests to confirm their features, such as actual user agent formatting. Spoofing or emulating browsers is another widely used technique to detect and block bad bots from accessing your website.
The other method involves identifying challenges, especially when a strange or possibly threatening request arrives.
Techniques to block bad bots from your website
- CAPTCHA or Block Out-fashioned User Agents/Browsers
The initial arrangement of various tools and scripts comprises user-agent string lists that are out of fashion to a large extent. This step will help prevent standard attacks, but it may not be effective for advanced attacks. The level of risk in disallowing out fashioned user browsers or agents is incredibly minimal, as most latest browsers often initiate updates on users, rendering it nearly impossible to browse using an outdated version.
- Stay Up to Date
To keep your website secure, ensure it is up to date with the recent releases. Regardless of the CRM provider you use, it is necessary to keep your eyes glued to that platform for updates. For example, it is vital to ensure your theme and plugins are up-to-date for those using WordPress.
There are many advantages to staying up to date. First, any bots using outdated versions will be blocked instantly when accessing your site. Additionally, platforms are inspired to offer secure products to their clients. Most of the latest updates contain advanced security features and bot deterrent options.
- Use Honeypots
Honeypots are another great option that can be used to unmask new bots on the website, particularly those conveyed by scrapers who are less informed on the structure of each page. However, this technique poses a minor risk of negating the page rank on Google, among other search engines. Search engine bots usually fail to navigate past this trap and interpret the links as passive, senseless, or inauthentic. The constant use of honeypots has the effect of decreasing website ranking significantly. However, if you have to use honeypots, use them carefully so as not to impact your ranking on search engines negatively.
- Automated Bot Prevention Remedies
The one-fit-all remedy to prevent bots from destroying your website is by picking a solid anti-bot protection. These bots use comprehensive algorithms to unmask the pattern of destructive bots and separate them from regular users, thereby ensuring that such bots are wholly destroyed.
- Carefully Analyze Traffic Sources
Take your time to analyze traffic sources cautiously. Are there any unusual spikes? Can you spot lower conversion rates from specific traffic sources? These can be indications of traffic originating from bots.
- Disallow Known Proxy Services and Hosting Providers
Many scrapers use known hosting providers and proxy services to send automated bot requests to their target website. Blocking these networks can deter attackers from targeting your website more often. This technique can help to tame less-sophisticated perpetrators but may not be entirely practical for more advanced attacks, mainly when attackers use hard-to-block networks.
Conclusion
From the above, it is apparent that not all bots are malignant. Some impact your website positively, especially when it comes to ranking on search engines. Therefore it is essential first to learn how to distinguish good bots from bad ones before deciding on the appropriate method to block them from your website. The methods or techniques discussed above can help lockout the bots at varied lengths. So, since there is no one-fits-all solution, use these methods jointly to combat bot attacks.
