8 Ways Bad Bots Destroy Your Website

Websites today receive less human request and more automated traffic. While the good bots are helping the website come up in search engine, there are bad bots that destroy your online presence by scraping your content or making automated attacks on your website to pull your business down. Bad bots can steal content and information, serve spam, make automated attacks to take over user account information among many other nefarious activities. So, you know these bots are bad, but how exactly are those bots hurting your website?

Such malicious bot attacks on your websites can have severe implications on your business.

1. Bad Bots Scrape Your Valuable Content

All that unique, high quality thought leadership content that your company has produced can easily be stolen by bots and posted elsewhere without your permission or any attribution. These scrapers can be your competitors or other bad actors who could benefit from scraping your website. In fact, you might not even realize your content has been stolen unless you’re actively searching for it.

2. Bad Bot Hurt Your SEO Ranking

Your website's SEO ranking is dependent on a lot of things: content quality, reliable backlinks, fast load time, etc. But bots can crawl your site and cripple the functionality and reliability of your website to the point where your SEO ranking plummets.

3. Bad Bots Scrape Pricing Information

Bad bots will crawl your site and collect information about what you are selling and at what price points are you selling it for, and then report that information back to your competitors. This prevents you from ever having the edge over your competition. They will always be one step ahead of you in pricing their products lower. This will result in more customers buying from your competition.

4. Bad Bots Overload Servers and Slow Your Site Load Time

Bot scripts are hefty chunks of data and extremely invasive, so they slow down the website load times. Not only does this frustrates users, but it also hurts your quality score.

5. Bots Skew Your Website Analytics

Your site analytics tells you how much traffic your site gets, how effective your advertising is, and the overall success of your site. Non-human interactions can skew these analytics and give you false data. This inaccurate metrics leads to poor decision making for web analytics team.

6. Bad Bots Engage in Malicious Activities like Account Takeover

Your competitors and hackers are always finding ways to make automated attacks on your website to get user information in the form of user credentials or other confidential information. This can lead to lack of trust in your site and business.

7. Bad Bots Engage in Click Fraud

Click fraud bots will find your ads and then click on them, which can alter your advertising stats and falsify your CTR. This essentially renders your ads useless, because you’re spending money on advertising that isn’t bringing in converting traffic. This can also mess with your analytics, which can affect the cost of your advertising.

8. Bad Bots Spam Your Site with Poor-Quality Backlinks

Bots do this by selling links from your site to clients and then commenting on your blog posts with their clients' poor-quality links. Sometimes, the links are harmless, but they usually take your readers back to questionable websites, where scammers are peddling anything from fake pills to malware. Scammers will even use a buffer site, so your audience doesn't realize they're on a more sinister site at first.

Is There a Way to Block Bad Bots?

There are some in-house techniques that companies use to block bad bots, but they are mostly ineffective. Many of these bot detection tools fall short of true identification because they rely on IP addresses or cookies in their model. This method of identification is easily thwarted by sophisticated bots that change their IP address continually or clear/disallow cookies. Sophisticated bots like these require more sophisticated bot detection technologies.

At InfiSecure our mission is to stop all automated attacks and keep a website free from all bad bots. InfiSecure is a next-generation bot mitigation solution that involves advanced technologies like device intelligence, device fingerprinting, machine learning, and behavioral analysis. The technology relies more on identifying the bot at the root, that is, at the device level. Doing so makes it easier to employ both static techniques, such as detecting the presence of malware on the device, and a complete behavioral analysis— that is, identifying a high number of attempts, a high number of failures, unusual traffic patterns, unusual speed of access and access attempts—that is more accurate and not so easily fooled.

Using a variety of techniques like these to identify and screen out the bots is a crucial factor in automated website threat prevention. While the threat from bots is pervasive and growing, companies that do business online would be wise to invest in sophisticated device intelligence, machine learning, and authentication technology to help turn the tables on bad actors.