How to prevent bad bots on your website

If you have a website for business, you should understand what bots are, how they may access it, and what they can do (deliberately or unintentionally) to thwart your marketing efforts on the internet.

Despite the fact that there are many different kinds of bots, they all serve diverse objectives and account for almost half of all website traffic worldwide.

For example, good bots will assist you with crucial services, whilst bad bots may attempt to significantly harm your company.

Therefore, it’s crucial to know how to block bad bots and prevent them from harming your website.

How does a bot work?

As stated, bots can be helpful for a variety of tasks, including indexing for search engines and enhancing client experiences.

Also, they might be hostile and harm your website or other online presence. Some bots are designed to crawl websites and steal data, including passwords, personally identifiable information, or other sensitive information.

They have the ability to launch malicious assaults on computers, websites, and other targets.

They can be used to increase online interaction as well. This could take the form of spamming a page or forum with comments, increasing sales or popularity of something to pique interest, increasing social media activity to increase views, or using other "gaming" techniques.

There are various indications that bots have visited your website:

- excessive blog or other page comments

- excessive or sudden high bounce rates on a particular page

- comments that don't seem to be human-generated or readable

- comments with obvious spam or excessive linking

- a sudden increase in newsletter sign-ups or other forms of email sign-up

- comments with log-in attempts from unknown sources, or any other activity that seems suspicious

15 methods to prevent bad bots

We need to pause for a moment and define a bot before getting into the specifics of what they can do as well as how you can stop them.

A software script that repeatedly processes data is known as a bot. They become a fellow participant in the online world we interact with because of their repetition and data interaction.

It can resemble trying to erect an invisible wall to keep attackers out when you try to prevent bots from accessing your website.

1.Determine the issue

You are very concerned about bots and want to know how they are hurting your website. It's always crucial to check what's happening on your site before moving further.

Do you constantly have bot problems, or is there merely a spike in activity?

Hence, if you suddenly learned that a swarm of malicious bots is infecting your website, you need to take action right away to fix this issue or else your site won't work properly.

After you have identified the issue, it’s time to begin taking the other steps necessary to block bad bots.

🔘 Related: Tips for Enhancing Website Security in Your Development Process

2.Stay up to date

Keep up with the most recent releases for your website and all of its integrations as one of the methods to prevent bad bots. Make sure you are up to date on the releases of the website CRM platform you choose to use.

If you use WordPress, for instance, you should make sure that your theme and plugins are up to date.

Keeping updated has its benefits. First, older versions may be used by bots to access a system. Additionally, platforms have an incentive to offer their clients secure products.

The most recent improvements might include enhanced security measures and bot blocker choices.

3.Inactive bot user elimination 

Similar to how a list of email subscribers and inactive users should be frequently checked and anything that doesn't meet the needs of the user should be removed, the same remarks should be ignored on a regular basis.

Bot users that managed to circumvent the sign-up authentication security level are easy to find and remove. But it's also crucial to remove accounts that haven't been used in a while in order to block bad bots.

Yet, inactive accounts often contain bots or are more vulnerable to malicious bots later on.

In general, malicious bots attempt to take over existing accounts rather than continuously creating new ones and hiding them.

4.Avoid using older browser versions

One of the other methods to prevent bad bots from accessing your website is to prevent earlier versions of your browser from visiting it. You can request that visitors see your website for business using more recent browsers.

This technique pushes all users to update to newer versions of their browsers and stops malicious bots from accessing your website.

You must update your site's .htaccess file when switching to a more recent version of the browser, but if you don't have the necessary technical knowledge, it's preferable to employ a web developer. 

5.Check your APIs

You might already have a ton of API integrations connected to other online platforms, especially if you've owned your website for a while.

APIs may be a point of vulnerability if you've permitted the API integration to connect and share data on your site.

Also, you may audit each plugin, API, and several other integrations. But, take into account the following possibilities:

- Do you employ them all?

- Do you use any of the most recent versions? If not, think about updating them.

- Do you use high-quality goods? Make a substitute if you don't have the necessary security preventive measures.

6.Take advantage of CAPTCHA 

One of the effective methods to prevent bad bots is adding CAPTCHA. Making ensuring that only people can complete tasks like sign-ups, contact forms, and purchase options on your website for business is one technique to prevent bots from engaging with those areas.

In order to show they are not a robot, CAPTCHA requires the user to complete a challenge or other action.

A bot won't complete this task and proceed unless the proper action is included in their script.

But, keep in mind that there is very little likelihood of successfully trying to stop outdated users. Most contemporary browsers will automatically update users, making it more challenging for users to browse the web on out-of-date versions.

7.Use sign-up authentication 

A sign-up authentication can dramatically lower the amount of bot accounts that wish to register on your website if it uses user accounts extensively.

Typically, sign-up authentications require a user's phone number or email address along with a verification code. Authentication is simple for humans but challenging for machines!

Also, it enables administrators to determine whether new users have confirmed accounts as accounts that have not been verified are frequently false.

8.Tagging alteration 

In some cases, seeing spam in your mailbox indicates that bots are associated with a tag that permits it. Yet, the contact form or the about page are typically where the largest problem lies.

Whatever you do, make sure your contact form hides email addresses because if you don't, the bot will quickly identify the correct email for scanning as opposed to utilizing an external script, which is much difficult for the bot to detect.

Above all, it's advisable to alter your email for an additional degree of security if your page lists it in a way that a bad bot (spam bot) can easily recognize.

9.Block proxy services and known hosting providers

Many less skilled criminals use readily available hosting and proxy services, even if the most expert attackers switch to other, harder to block networks.

By preventing access from these sources, you may be able to deter attackers from targeting your website, API, and mobile apps.

10.Safeguard any access point you can

Next on our list of methods to prevent bad bots is protecting access points.  Always take precautions to avoid being exposed to mobile apps and APIs when dealing with malicious bots.

Also, whenever it's practical, think about transferring blocking data between systems.

11.Keep track of failed login attempts

Failure to log in is expected, but when it happens frequently or there is a noticeable increase, you are immediately informed of it.

Seasonal checkups won't cut it; you need to check frequently all year round!

12.Keep an eye out for public data leaks

Credentials that have just been stolen are more likely to still be in use. Expect malicious bots to frequently run those credentials against your website for business when significant breaches happen elsewhere.

13.Comment restriction

It's crucial to frequently review any comments on your website because you may come across comments that are harming your websites, such as spam comments with incorrect links and more.

In the event that you have serious problems with spamming bots constantly visiting your website, you can set up a manual comment moderation system to prevent this.

Even so, personally moderating comments can be time-consuming, but it's the only way to completely get rid of bots and spam.

🔘 Related: How to prevent cyber attacks

The majority of modern bots are harmful, and if you want to properly block bad bots on a server or website, you need to use the right bot management system to analyze their activity.

Look for bot management solutions that can detect bots automatically and effectively use both ML and AI for real-time bot activity detection.

15.Monitor your website constantly

Bot blocking is a continuous process. You must keep an eye out for any issues with your website.

You can keep an eye out for any of the issues mentioned above and take action to patch any openings. For a monthly or quarterly check-in, you might want to put this on your calendar.

Keep an eye out for any public data breaches as well. Check your website for any indications of bot activity if you hear of any large-scale attacks.

Conclusion

We'll probably talk more about how to block bad bots and integrate them into our marketing stack as AI in marketing develops. Bots can enhance our digital marketing strategy and be useful in our digital operations.

Also, they might be hostile and target your website for business at any time. Being diligent and maintaining an updated, clutter-free web presence are the greatest ways to deter bots.

In this article, we explained some of the most effective methods to prevent bad bots. If you have more questions regarding bots and their impact, contact us now.