Stop Spam Bots With Semalt
It is important to block bad traffic that is preventing you from reaching your site and showing fake views in your Google Analytics. First of all, you should understand whether your traffic is coming from Google or bots are involved. If you see an unexpected surge in traffic, there are chances that it is not legitimate as you have not done SEO properly. In Google Analytics, you should visit the Traffic Sources section and check the quality of traffic as well as the IP addresses. Web crawlers, robots or auto-refreshers: you can name them anything but cannot ignore the fact that software uses the World Wide Web just like real humans. Unfortunately, they give no benefit to your websites and only pretend to act like people, giving you lots of views. On the other hand, it may not be possible for anyone to drive lots of traffic to his/her website because of the high competition. You may end up your efforts by having bots that can de-index your site in the search engine results. Google only looks for links and pages that provide users with real and authentic information. If you are having lots of spambots that look like real humans, you must search for solutions in forums where anti-spam activities are often discussed. And if you are tired of the invisible robots, the bots and malware have been designed to give page views, fake hits, and maybe affiliate link clicks, without letting you generate real leads.
Thankfully, it is possible to get rid of the bots and spam by keeping in mind a few important things. In this regard, Max Bell, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, offers you to consider the following tips:
The Problem with Bots
You can understand the real problem of bots only when considering some of the examples. The first example is that if you have the Google bots, these are usually designed to give you human-like page views. You might also suffer from bots that are designed to force you to refresh your web pages. Both of them visit your sites, increasing traffic and analytics hits. They have high bounce rate and spend low time on the web pages. The only difference between these two bots is that the Google bots do something beneficial, feeding data back to index your sites, while the refresh bots inflate your traffic statistics to a great extent, putting your affiliate programs in jeopardy. Thus, it is very important to identify the bots and prevent them as early as possible. You don't have to do much as Google provides lots of programs and tools to make your work easier. Spammers might block their bots for some time, but the blocking at your side should be permanent for better results.
Blocking Unwanted Bot Traffic
You can block unwanted bot traffic with the .htaccess files. If you block the bots in these files, you would be able to improve the overall performance of your website. Using this method, you can only block the bots that can be identified and are known as spambots. If the bots identify themselves as legitimate users, you are better to block their IP addresses as early as possible. You cannot block all of the bots until you determine their IP addresses and adjust the settings in your web host.
Another method is blocking bots using your .htaccess files. It is also important that you block as many IP addresses as possible, or replace the unsafe IP addresses with the safe ones. If you are a WordPress user, you must handle bad bot traffic as this is the platform where the hackers attack the files in a large number. You can edit your .htaccess file, and insert different codes to stay safe on the internet.