The Impact of Bad Bots on Listing & Classifieds Websites

The essential asset for any listing or classifieds industry website is its fresh content and unique listings. Today’s online marketplace and classified sites face threats from fraudsters, competitors, and hackers. Bad actors and competitors are increasingly leveraging malicious bots to steal content programmatically, to put your website security, customer base and brand at risk.

Impacts of bots on Listing & Classifieds Industry

1. Bots scrape your unique content & listing
   When your business deals in ads and listings, your competitors are always on the run to steal your website’s unique content and listings, trying to pull your website down with malicious bots that can scrape your data.


2. Fake Leads
   The success of listing and classified sites depends on advertisers and users that post their listings. While revenue from those advertisers and users is critical for your business, malicious bots create fake accounts and fill the form with fake details and end up as dead leads that can never get converted. Now, you ultimately stand a risk of losing advertisers because of the spambots.


3. User Data Theft
   Your registered users leave their data on your servers. Having user data brings huge responsibility for data protection and protection from account takeover, hacking attempts, carding fraud and user data theft. Fraudsters can steal your user data for lead generation using bots, due to this you may lose your legitimate customers and their trust in your brand.


4. Reduced Server Performance
   The unwanted and undetected bot traffic on your website will increase the server load and bandwidth costs. This will make your webpage load slow and frustrate your genuine customers. Your customers may end up transacting from your competitor’s website.


5. Skewed Analytics
   Website analytics play a significant role in online businesses like listing and classifieds. As per our recent study, more than half of all web traffic is generated by online bots. An efficient analytics system should differentiate between the genuine human traffic and bot traffic and give details of both types of traffic separately. When the differentiation is not done correctly, then the website analytics is skewed. Undetected bot traffic is always mistaken as genuine human traffic. This leads to misrepresentation of your business’s KPIs and wrong decisions.

Benefits of using a Bot Mitigation Solution

InfiSecure Bot Mitigation solution safeguards your website from all automated attacks. Having a Bot Mitigation solution in place, your website will be protected from all types of bad bots in real-time.

1. Real-time Bot Detection
   InfiSecure bot detection engine detects scraping bots in real-time and blocks them from scraping your unique content and listings.


2. User Data Protection
   Protects your website from hackers and scrapers that steal your user data for generating leads.


3. Blocks Fake Bookings
   Bot mitigation solution eliminates fake accounts and fake bookings generated through spam bots and allows only human traffic to your website.


4. Prevent Brute Force Attacks
   InfiSecure Bot Mitigation solution stops hacking attempts, account takeovers and application DDOS protection.

Online classifieds need to detect and mitigate bots that steal unique listings, generate fake traffic and spam listings. InfiSecure is a most accurate bot mitigation solution provider for listing websites against all automated threats.