Bots have become an essential component of today’s digital landscape. They assist us in ordering groceries, playing music on our Slack channel, and repaying our coworkers for the great smoothies they brought us. Bots also fill the internet, carrying out the purposes for which they were built.
So, what does this mean for website owners?
And, perhaps most significantly, what does this mean for the environment?
Continue reading to learn all you need to know about bot traffic and why it matters!
What is a Bot?
Let us start with the basics: A bot is a software application that runs automated tasks via the Internet. Bots can mimic or even replace the behavior of an actual person. They excel at doing repetitive and tedious jobs. They are also fast and efficient, making them ideal for large-scale tasks.
What is Bot Traffic?
Bot traffic refers to any non-human traffic to a website or application. It is frequently associated with negativity, although it isn’t always bad; it all depends on the bots’ intent.
Some bots are required for useful services like search engines and digital assistants (e.g., Siri and Alexa). Most firms accept these types of bots on their websites.
Other bots may be malevolent, such as those used for password stuffing, data scraping, and DDoS assaults. Even more innocuous ‘bad’ bots, such as illegal web crawlers, can cause problems by disrupting site statistics and generating click fraud.
It is thought to make up more than 40% of all Internet traffic, with malevolent bots accounting for a sizable chunk of that. This is why so many firms are seeking strategies to limit bot activity on their websites.
Good Bot Vs Bad Bot
Bots may be either useful or destructive. Here’s how they vary:
Good Bots
Commonly useful bots include but are not limited to:
- Site Monitoring Bots
These bots can detect system faults and track the performance of your website. We utilize tools like Site Audit, to notify you of concerns like as outages and sluggish response times. Continuous monitoring ensures that your site performs well and is available to your visitors.
- Crawlers from SEO Tools
Tool bots, such as the SemrushBot, explore your website to assist you in making educated decisions, such as improving meta tags and determining page indexability. These bots are beneficial since they assist you in adhering to SEO best practices.
- Search Engine Crawlers
Search engines utilize bots like Googlebot to index and rank your website’s pages. Without these bots scanning your site, your pages would not be indexed, and customers would not be able to locate your company in search results.
Bad Bots
You may not notice traffic or proof of malicious bots daily, but you should constantly be aware of the possibility of being attacked.
Bad bots, including but not limited to:
- Spam Bots
Bots may also generate and spread spam content, such as phishing emails, false social media profiles, and forum postings. Spam may mislead users and jeopardize internet security by fooling them into disclosing important information.
- Scrapers
Bots may scrape and steal content from your website without your consent. Publishing the knowledge elsewhere is intellectual property theft and copyright violation. If consumers see your material replicated elsewhere on the internet, the credibility of your brand may be jeopardized.
- DDoS Bots
DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) bots attempt to overwhelm your servers and prevent users from accessing your website by flooding them with bogus traffic. These bots can interrupt your site’s availability, causing downtime and financial losses if users are unable to access or purchase what they require.
How Does Bot Traffic Affects Websites and Analytics?
It can distort website statistics and produce false data by impacting the following:
- Session Durations
Bots can have an impact on the session length metric, which indicates how long visitors spend on your website. Bots that surf your website rapidly or slowly might change the average session time, making it difficult to determine the genuine quality of the user experience.
- Page Views
It can artificially increase the amount of page views, giving the impression that visitors are engaged with your website more than they are.
- Conversions
Bots can interfere with your conversion goals, such as form submissions, sales, or downloads, by using phony information and emails.
- Location of Users
By concealing their IP addresses or employing proxies, it gives the appearance that your site’s users are originating from somewhere else.
It can potentially have a detrimental influence on your website’s performance and user experience.
- Damaging your Reputation and Security
Bots can degrade your website’s reputation and security by stealing or scraping content, pricing, and data. An assault (such as DDoS) might lose your income and client confidence. With your site potentially unavailable, your rivals may gain if visitors visit them instead.
- Consuming Server Resources
Bots can waste bandwidth and server resources, especially if they are malevolent or in large volume. This can slow down page load times, raise hosting prices, and possibly cause your website to collapse.
How Can Websites Manage Bot Traffic?
The first step in preventing or regulating bot traffic on a website is to add a robots.txt file. This is a file that contains instructions for bots crawling the website, and it may be set to block bots from viewing or interacting with a webpage entirely. However, only good bots will follow the restrictions in robots.txt; bad bots will still crawl a website.
A variety of technologies can assist reduce abusive bot traffic. A rate-limiting solution can detect and prohibit bot traffic originating from a single IP address, but it will still miss a significant amount of malicious bot traffic. In addition to rate limitation, a network engineer can examine a site’s traffic and identify questionable network requests, producing a list of IP addresses to block using a filtering tool. This is a time-consuming operation that only reduces a part of unwanted bot traffic.
Apart from rate restriction and direct engineer involvement, the simplest and most efficient approach to eliminate harmful bot traffic is via a bot control system. A bot management solution can utilize intelligence and behavioural analysis to detect dangerous bots before they reach a website.
Connect with Marketing Lad today for your tailored solutions!
FAQs
1. What is bot traffic, and how does it differ from organic traffic?
It is defined as automated visits to a website initiated by software programs known as bots or crawlers. Unlike organic traffic, which consists of actual human visitors, this traffic is frequently generated by search engine spiders, web scrapers, or malicious bots. It can bias website statistics and impact performance metrics.
2. How can I identify bot traffic on my website?
To identify this on your website, look for odd patterns in activity, such as a large number of visitors with short session durations or frequent visits to certain sites. Analyze your website logs or utilize analytics solutions that include bot detection capabilities to distinguish between bot visits and legitimate user traffic.
3. What are the common sources of bot traffic?
It is commonly generated by search engine crawlers such as Googlebot and Bingbot, which index web pages for search engines. Other sources include online scrapers employed by rivals or data aggregators, malicious bots that scrape or spam websites, and automated systems for website monitoring or performance testing.
4. What are the potential risks or drawbacks associated with bot traffic?
It can cause skewed website analytics, deceptive performance metrics, increased server strain, which raises hosting costs, and vulnerability to harmful activities such as scraping, spamming, or DDoS assaults. It can also influence website performance and user experience, potentially resulting in lower engagement and transactions.
5. How can I prevent or mitigate the impact of bot traffic on my website’s analytics and performance?
To minimize or limit the impact of this, use procedures such as controlling bot access using a robots.txt file, filtering out harmful bots with CAPTCHA or bot detection tools, and frequently monitoring website analytics to identify and prohibit suspicious bot activity. Consider using rate limitation or IP blocking for aggressive bots.
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