Why and How You Should Block Bots From Your Business Website

Around 42% of the traffic on the Internet comes from bots. It's fairly common for websites to receive traffic from bots as they process and index your website for further use.

You don't want bots with malicious intent roaming around your website and cataloging information to harm you in the future.

Cyber theft is an alarming concern in today's age and bad bots put your website security at risk of various online threats.

Let's take a deeper look at why you should look to avoid bots on your business website and the various ways you can do so with ease. Keep reading to know more.

What are bots (and how do they affect websites)?

A bot or robot is a software application that performs simple automated tasks on the Internet. It tries to imitate human activity such as messaging and generally has harmless intent. In other words, any non-human activity you receive on your website is a bot activity.

Bots provide a crucial service to companies — performing routine tasks at a much faster speed than humans and freeing them for complex tasks. Moreover, you want good bots from recognized sources such as Google, Bing, and Facebook and indexing your website.

It's when the bad bots with questionable sources visit your website that your security comes under threat. In fact, good bots in large quantities can also overload your system, making it slow and prone to deteriorate further.

Here's how bots affect your business website and how you can block them for smooth functioning:

1. How do bots impact your business negatively

A good bot won’t hide its identity. It's owned by a legitimate company and follows the rules and policies laid down by your website while it operates on it. A bad bot, on the other hand, disguises itself as a human and actively tries to sabotage your website.

The process to block bots opted by you needs to take good bots into consideration and needs to weed them out while attacking the bad ones. It also needs to separate legitimate human users from bots acting as humans.

Here are some of the ways bad bots harm your website:

a) DDoS

A distributed denial of service attack is one of the most common cyberattacks carried out by bots. It attempts to disrupt the usual traffic of a website or network by overwhelming it with fake traffic consisting of bad bots.

These bots or botnets carry malware in them, injecting the site with them and harming or compromising it. They can cause your site to go offline for hours, days, or weeks, depending on the severity.

b) Steal data

Content scraper bots steal content from your website without your permission. Having your sensitive data compromised opens you up for legal penalties as well as impact your business reputation in the long run.

Even the federal database is not immune to data breaches by bots. A breach in 2020 impacted 8,000 small business owners when their applications were exposed.

c) Slows speed

Increased bot activities on your website will impact its speed as they put more strain on your servers to function. This is possible even with good bots visiting your website. It becomes challenging for human users to perform desired activities on your website due to slow speed.

Not only does slow speed drive users away, but it also impacts your SEO performance as you don't attract the desired target audience. It also adds to the bounce rate of your website.

d) Mislead your analytics

When an abnormally large portion of your visitors are bots, the analytics and data you derive from their activity are not accurate. You need human activities to determine their behavior and base your marketing efforts on and bots mislead your analytics by disrupting the activities.

e) Spam you with fraudulent links

Bots called spambots spam the areas of your website that allow user interaction. They put fraudulent links in forms, chatbots and comment sections to web spaces that fraud or scam people or are generally unethical.

At the very least, it can ruin your reputation among your target audience. And at most, it can get you penalized by Google.

2. How to identify harmful bots

We talked about the importance of identifying and separating harmful bots from good ones and human users. You need good bots and human users on your site. And the fact that bad bots disguise themselves as them makes it challenging to identify and block them.

Bad bots not only mimic human behavior but also use human fingerprints such as IP addresses as well as OS data. Based on their efficiency to copy human behavior, bots can be divided into four categories: simple, moderate-level, sophisticated and advanced.

Identifying harmful bots is the first step in containing them. There are three main approaches used to differentiate harmful bots from good bots as well as real human traffic:

a) Challenge-based approach

This approach poses a challenge in front of every user that attempts to enter your website. CAPTCHAs are the most common example of challenge-based tests. You might recognize them as simple puzzle challenges that appear when you enter a site.

A challenge such as solving a very simple math problem or identifying something in an image is extremely easy for a human to perform. However, it will be very tough for a bot to do so, even if it's mimicking human behavior. However, half the bots today can bypass a CAPTCHA test.

b) Fingerprint-based approach

Also called a static approach, this method relies on a bot management software to analyze a user's signature and fingerprint and match them with what you already have in a database. It may look for elements such as IP address, location and browser data.

By cross-checking the information, the bot management system can decipher if the user is a legitimate user or not. They would either have identical fingerprints or be somewhat similar to be deemed authentic.

c) Behavior-based approach

This dynamic approach focuses on analyzing the behavior of the bot after it has entered your website instead of its fingerprint. In other words, it looks at what the bot is doing rather than what it is to determine its authenticity.

The bot management software will look at activities such as the user's mouse movements, typing patterns, and browsing patterns as they tend to be more random for humans than a bot.

3. How to contain bots

Blocking bots straight away isn’t the best option. Firstly, you can accidentally block good bots and human users, hurting your own cause. Secondly, you don't want the bot to know that they're blocked from entering your site.

The better approach would be to identify bad bots from legitimate users and contain them. The goal should be to protect your website from attacks of the bots such as DDoS attacks. Here are some of the best ways to go about it:

a) Challenge the bot

Look to make it difficult for the bot to enter your website. Stop them right away and avoid any further damage. Put up challenges in the form of CAPTCHAs at the entrance of your site. You can even put them on interaction points such as sign-ups or purchases.

Doing so catches the bot even if they have escaped the entrance challenges. It won’t affect the human user while catching bots like a fisher net and containing them.

b) Honey trap

As the name suggests, this method lets the bot inside your website and lets it operate as it intended. However, it feeds the bot false or fake information. An alternate way to do this is to redirect the bot to another page that is similar to your webpage but entirely fake.

This method relies on identifying the bot right away and redirecting it to a different page with false information. So, the identification needs to be foolproof for it to work efficiently.

c) Rate limiting

Also called throttling, this method allows the bot to enter the website but limits the speed at which it can operate. The goal is to make the bot and its operator give up on its operation due to receiving very low speed.

You will have to slow down the bandwidth allocation to the bot to make its operations slower. This also relies on letting an identified bot on your website and feed on at least some information before it leaves.

Identify and block bad bots to protect your website

While bots make up a large amount of traffic on the Internet, you need to protect your website from bad bot activity that can harm your website with attacks and steal data from it.

The best defense against bad bots is to identify them and block them from entering your website.

Put up challenges on various interaction points of your website to identify and catch bad bots. Check their behavior to separate them from human users and contain them before they can harm you.