The Most Prevalent Bots in Listings and Classifieds Industry

The most important asset for any listing or classifieds industry website is its fresh content and its unique listings. Today’s online marketplace and classified sites face threats from bad actors, 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.

Malicious automated traffic on a listing and classified websites can compromise the security of your web application and result in loss of site information and confidential data. Chances are that there are bots on your site right now.

The most common bots in listing and classifieds industry are listed below:

1. Search Engine Spiders

Search engine spiders are those who crawl a website such as Googlebot and Bing bot, consuming resource and bandwidth, indexing the pages to learn what they are about to make them more searchable. Search engine spiders are considered positive for your website as they help you improve your search engine ranking.

2. Content Scrapers

Content scraper bots are intended to scrape website’s content and other data. When your business deals in classified ads and listings, your competitors are always on the run to steal your website's unique content and listings, trying to pull your site down with malicious bots that can scrape your data.

3. User Data Theft Bots

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. Spammers

The Internet is filled with mischievous spammers who use form spamming to create multiple fake listings on websites. Individual spammers post fake listings on the sites using automated scripts.

5. Fake Lead Generator Bots

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.

Above mentioned are the most common bots in listing and classifieds industry. Malicious automation would surely have a negative impact on your website and your business. It is always wise to know exactly what is hitting your site and what is the reason behind those hits, then only you will be able to take the most appropriate action.

Once you can detect bots and identify what bots are doing on your website you can start to manage them correctly using a bot mitigation solution that safeguards your site from all automated attacks.