Everything You Need to Know About Bot Traffic and How to Stop It

What Is Bot Traffic?​

Bot traffic describes any non-human traffic that visits a website. Whether the website is a hugely popular news site or a small, newly published startup, the site is bound to be visited by a certain number of bots over time.

While the term bot traffic is often misconstrued to be inherently harmful, this is not always the case. There is no doubt that some bot traffic is designed to be malicious and can negatively affect Google Analytics data. These web crawlers can be used for credential stuffing, data scraping, and in some cases, even launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

However, there are legitimate bots that are essential for the operation of specific web services, such as search engines and digital assistants. Therefore, digital publishers need to use their analytics data to discern between human behavior and the good, the bad, and the ugly of bot traffic.

Types of Bots to Watch Out for​

As mentioned, specific bots are required for the operation and optimal performance of search engines and digital assistants. However, specific search engine bots are explicitly designed not to cause damage to sites and user experience.

The types of bot traffic to watch out for include:

Click Bots​

Click bots, which are used in click spamming, make fraudulent ad clicks. For most web publishers, particularly those using pay-per-click (PPC) ads, this is considered the most damaging type of bot. This is because click bots skew data analytics, replicating web traffic that erodes advertising budgets without any benefit.

Download Bots​

Similar to click bots, download bots also interfere with genuine user engagement data. However, rather than affecting the ad click count, they create a fake dowload count. This is most pertinent when a publisher uses a marketing funnel such as a free ebook download. Download bots create a phony download, leading to false performance data.

Spam Bots​

Spambots, also known as form-filling bots, are the most common bot. The purpose of a spambot is often to scrape contact information, including email addresses and phone numbers, create fake user accounts, or operate stolen social media accounts. They also disrupt user engagement through the distribution of unwarranted content, such as:

• Spam comments, including referral spam
• Phishing emails
• Website redirects
• Negative SEO against competitors

Spy Bots​

Spy bots are so named because they act in precisely that manner—as spies. They steal data and information, such as email addresses from websites, chat rooms, social media sites, and forums.

Scraper Bots​

Scraper bots visit websites with the sole intent of stealing publishers' content. Scraper bots can create a real threat to a business and its web pages. Created by third-party scrapers, they are employed by business competitors to steal valuable content, such as lists of products and prices that are then repurposed and published by rival sites.

Imposter Bots​

Imposter bots replicate human behavior by appearing as genuine website visitors. They intend to bypass online security measures and are most often responsible for DDoS activity.

What Is Good Bot Traffic?​

While the above examples are undoubtedly cases of harmful bot traffic, what are some instances of good bot traffic?

The following bots are legitimate and are there to provide helpful solutions for websites and applications.

Search Engine Bots​

Search engine bots are the most obvious and well-known of the “good” bots. Search engine bots crawl the web and help website owners get their websites listed in search results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These bots are helpful SEO tools.

Monitoring Bots​

Monitoring bots help publishers ensure their website is healthy and accessible while operating at peak performance. Monitoring bots operate by automatically pinging the site to ensure it is still online. If anything breaks or the site goes offline, the publisher will be automatically notified, making these bots very useful to website owners.

SEO Crawlers​

SEO crawlers are software that fetch and index a website and its competitors to provide data and analytics on page views, users, and content. Web admins can then use these reports to plan their content to improve their referral traffic, search visibility, and organic traffic.

Copyright Bots​

Copyright bots crawl the internet, scanning for copyrighted images to ensure no one is illegally using copyrighted content without permission.

What is bad bot traffic?​

Unlike the good bots we just covered, bad bot traffic can inflict a lot of harm to your website and can do a lot of damage if left unchecked. This can take the shape of sending false or spam traffic to something far more disruptive, such as ad fraud.

DDoS (Denial of Service) Networks​

The DDoS bot has to be one of the oldest and nastiest bots out there.

Known as distributed denial of service bots, this software is placed on unsuspecting victims' computers and is used to take down a specific website or server.

DDoS attacks have been blamed for causing significant financial harm in the past, with Network Security service provider Corero estimating that such an attack in the US https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/opinions/the-true-cost-of-ddos-attacks/ on average.

Web Scrapers​

Web scrapers scrape webpages for valuable data such as email addresses and contact information.

In some circumstances, they can steal text and images from websites and re-use them on other websites or social media profiles without permission.

Click Fraud Bots​

There are numerous sophisticated bots generating malicious bot traffic exclusively toward paid advertisements. Unlike bots that generate unwanted website traffic, these bots engage in ad fraud.

As the name suggests, this non-human traffic drives clicks to paid ads and costs advertisers billions of dollars every year. Frequently disguised as legitimate traffic, publishers have a https://datadome.co/bot-detection/why-click-fraud-protection-is-important-for-publishers-too/ to adopt bot detection tools to help weed out the illicit traffic.

Vulnerability Scanners​

Various malicious bots exist to search millions of websites for vulnerabilities and report them to their creators.

Unlike genuine bots that notify the website owner, these malicious bots are designed to send information to a third party, which can sell the information or use it to hack the websites.

Spam Bots​

Spam bots are designed to leave messages designed by the bot’s creator on a website’s comment section. These bots need to create accounts and while https://support.google.com/a/answer/1217728? to filter out software-driven account creation, these tests are not always successful.

How Does Bot Traffic Affect Websites?​

An important thing to understand about bots is that most scripts and programmes are designed to perform the same task multiple times. The bot's creator undoubtedly wants the task done as quickly as possible, but this can cause a lot of issues for your website.

Bot traffic can effectively destroy businesses if they don't learn how to identify and manage and filter bot traffic. Sites that rely on advertising alongside sites that sell products and merchandise with limited inventory are particularly vulnerable.

For sites that are running ads, bots that land on the site and click on various page elements can trigger fake ad clicks. This is known as click fraud, and while it may initially increase ad revenue, once online advertising networks detect the fraud, it will usually result in the site and the owner being banned from their network.

For eCommerce sites with limited inventory, inventory hoarding bots can virtually shut down their shop by filling carts with tons of merchandise, making it unavailable for genuine shoppers to purchase.

If a bot requests information from your site regularly, it can cause it to slow down. This means that the site will be slow for everyone who visits it, which can cause significant issues for an online business. Too much bot traffic can take your entire website offline in severe circumstances.

Fortunately, this only happens in the most severe cases; most of the time, the effects of bot traffic on your website are minor. When your website receives a lot of unauthorized bot traffic, you can expect to see things like:

• More page views
• High bandwidth usage
• Incorrect Google Analytics reports
• Conversion decreases
• Junk emails
• Longer load times
• Increased bounce rate

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