Bot Traffic Detection Techniques | What Is Bot Traffic Attack And How To Prevent Your Website Against It

How To Detect and Prevent A Bot on a Website.

Bot traffic is any non-human traffic on a website.

Website bots are automated computer software programs, that are built to carry out tasks online based on instructions.

Have you ever noticed unusual high page views, high bounce rate, and high or low session duration on your website?

Do you have high traffic from an unexpected location? A website bot might be behind it.

If you want to learn how to detect the presence of a bot on your website, please read this article with maximum concentration.

WHAT IS BOT TRAFFIC

Bot traffic is a term used to describe any activity on a website that is not performed by humans. Such activities are usually repetitive and very swift.

Both traffic can be harmful or beneficial to a site, depending on the purpose of the bot.

DDoS attacks, content scraping, etc. are all the results of bot attacks on a website.

This explains why webmasters are usually not comfortable with the presence of bots on their websites.

WEBSITE BOT TRAFFIC DETECTION TECHNIQUES

There are so many techniques that can be used to detect the activities of these bots on your website, some of them are listed here;

Behavioral Pattern Detection Technique

Fingerprinting Detection Technique

Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) detection Technique

HOW TO DETECT THE PRESENCE OF BOT TRAFFIC ON YOUR WEBSITE

To detect the activities of a website bot on your site, you must install an analytics tool on your website, and monitor the parameters closely.

A very good analytics tool to use is the popular Google analytics.

The following analytics Parameters can be used to detect the activities of a website bot are;

• Increase in website traffic, or page views that have no link to your activities, In actual sense websites, get traffic from various sources, usually direct, organic, social, referral, and paid campaigns.  But when you begin to notice only direct traffic to a page, just know that a bad bot is at work.
• Longer server load time and low server performance is also an indication of a website bot attack.
• High Traffic from unknown sources such as direct traffic from new unique users and sessions, increased suspicious hits from a single IP address, or hits from various other languages other than your primary website language, etc. can also be a pointer to bot activity.
• High Bounce rate: An unhealthy bounce that is 25% above your normal figure is also an indication of bad bots activity on your website.
•  Unusual account creation or sign-ups with weird email addresses, Increase in Junk emails with fake names, phone numbers all indicate bot attack on a website.

SOME HARMFUL EFFECTS OF BOT TRAFFIC ON A WEBSITE

Apart from stealing content and wasting your bandwidth, the presence of a bad bot on your website can mess up your statistics, making it difficult to measure site performance and optimize conversion rates.

Some of the ways these bots affect a website include; Longer load times and Higher bandwidth usage; this is also attributed to the activities of bad bots on your website. What do I mean? Several bots hit received within a short time, slows down server, and stretches bandwidth. This longer load time and poor server performance have a negative impact on user experience on the website, which can lead to low conversion.

Increase in page views that result in the wrong Google Analytics report.

HOW TO PROTECT YOUR WEBSITE FROM BOT ATTACK

It possible to stop bot attack on your website, but it is also recommended that you don’t block all bots because not all of them are bad. There are good and bad bots.

Yes, I said some bots are good for your site a good example is search engine spider.

To protect your site from harmful bots that scrape content, generate fake traffic, or launch DDoS attack,  quietly install firewall protection. Simply install a free CloudFlare, a bot management solution.

CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)  that allows legitimate users to access your website.  It acts as an application firewall between the website and the user

Another way to stop bot attack on your website is by using PPC Protect; this tool is recommended for e-commerce merchants.

It is an automated fraud detection tool that identifies bot traffic that clicks on ads and blocks such users from seeing your ads.

Other methods to prevent bot on the website are;   The use of Device Fingerprinting, blocking unknown hosting providers, etc.

HOW TO HIDE EMAIL ADDRESS ON WEBSITE FROM BOTS

There are several ways you can use to hide or protect email address on a website from spammers online. Some of them are listed below;

You can hide an email address on a website using JavaScript or CSS trick. All you need to do is write a javascript function to hide email address and protect it from unauthorized users.

You can also hide the email address from website bots using email address encoder; a plugin that protects email address by encoding them into decimals and hexadecimal.

You can encrypt the email address HTML mailto link. The email address can be converted to HTML text, with a clickable phrase display over it, while the email address is hidden away from bots.

You can also use the rotate by 13 places (ROT13) Encryption, where each letter is replaced by a letter 13 places away from itself. This method confers an additional layer of obfuscation on the email.

Have you experienced a bot attack on your website? If yes, please let us know how you managed it in the comment section.

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