It is possible to completely block bot traffic to a new website?

[savitaprasad]

I started my first wordpress blog last month and already seeing tons of bot traffic messing up my stats. Really hope someone here knows how to deal with this.

Keep checking this thread. Already some good responses here.

 

[MrDom]

I am not specialized in the topic. But would like to add if someone knows, would adding a simple honeypot and automated IP monitoring system to immediately block IPs clicking honeypot, mostly solve it? Or they can easily bypass basic honeypots already?

 

[DN AGENCY]

Yes. You can block bots completely using robots.txt, firewall rules, or IP/User-Agent blocking.

 

[HexaForge]

You can reduce bots, but you can’t block them .Use Cloudflare firewall rules, bot fight mode, rate limiting, and block bad ASNs it cuts most cheap bots but some will always get through.

 

[McDermott18422]

Completely? Highly unlikely. You can filter out the bulk of non-human requests with robust firewall rules, rate limiting, and advanced challenge systems. Persistent bad actors will always find a way to test your defenses, but you can make it costly for them to persist.

 

[savitaprasad]

Completely? Highly unlikely. You can filter out the bulk of non-human requests with robust firewall rules, rate limiting, and advanced challenge systems. Persistent bad actors will always find a way to test your defenses, but you can make it costly for them to persist.

How much will cost to build such a system?

 

[lucas999]

That impossible but you can block knowing bots

 

[savitaprasad]

That impossible but you can block knowing bots

You mean specific protection after knowing the particular bot?

 

[Pluncray]

Cloudfare is free? How reliable is this free service?

Cloudfare is a very reliable service. You can try it.

 

[mrblackhat23]

It is possible to completely block bot traffic to a new website?

Yes use WordFence to block ip addresses

 

[theusualkeysersoze]

Wow the people in this thread, so many brutal and epic misinformed statements...

Of course you can absolutely block every bot. It appears most people posting here have never seen a cloudflare backoffice or heard of under attack mode. You can actually block every single visit and only permit access by ip whitelisting. This is the very first line and action of defense in case of a ddos, for crying out loud.

The real question is how do you give access or how to not be too restrictive and cause false positives.

And bot is not equal bot, if a bot comes with a human looking browsing pattern, mouse movements and wrapped in an anti detect and proxy all nicely configured, you will not be wiser about it, you will have to add things like call verification perhaps kyc to be entirely sure since email verification and sms verification can be done dealt with rather easy.

Conclusion, of course you can block all bots, you can literally block every visitor if you desire to do so.

 

[ListAndFuse]

You can block access to some robots with a few code lines in robots.txt, as long as you know the robots' names. Here are some examples :

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: SemrushBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: DotBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: BLEXBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: SeobilityBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow:

 

[theusualkeysersoze]

I started my first wordpress blog last month and already seeing tons of bot traffic messing up my stats. Really hope someone here knows how to deal with this.

Yeah I do and the Internet is a very hostile place. I set up every website directly to the metal and issue own certificates via ssh and harden my own servers. The first thing you wanna make sure is to fail2ban the ssh brute force attempts, that will make the world a better place one ban at a time and you really really do not want any bot ssh into your hosting space.

That's the first thing.

The second, set up CF as reverse proxy.

These 2 are absolute minimum due diligence. The only reason why I sometimes leave cf out initially and don't fail2ban fro day one is, it actually gives you some sort of fake traffic metrics , can be good when looking for affiliate partnerships and such.

 

[charlieotte]

You can book IPs and suspicious traffic, but advanced bots can mimic humans.

 

[TechEinstien]

It is not entirely possible.

 

[lisa2276]

You can reduce bot traffic, but it’s not possible to block it completely. Using tools like firewalls, rate limiting, and bot management helps filter most bad bots while allowing search engines through.

 

[contact_yeasin]

not 100% but you can use clodflare to block bot traffics. you also block some IPs also

 

[JamesWolfson]

Bot Traffic is normal, especially in the early days of a website.

 

[Katherine_1204]

No, it is neither possible nor advisable to completely block all bot traffic for a new website. Essential "good bots," like search engine crawlers from Google and Bing, must be allowed to index your site for SEO and visibility. The realistic goal is to minimize harmful bots. This is effectively done using specialized services like Cloudflare Bot Management or similar solutions, which use behavioral analysis and machine learning to identify and block malicious automated traffic while permitting legitimate bots.

 

[VisitRomeDVD]

you can reduce bot traffic a lot, but you can’t make a website 100% bot-free.