How to avoid unwanted bot traffic
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 6:37 am
Last week we helped you prepare your website for Black Friday traffic spikes . Now that you’re ready to handle the increased traffic, do you know how much of it is real and how much is non-human? According to Statista, in 2022 over 40% of internet traffic comes from bots and a significant portion of that is malicious bot traffic. This type of bot traffic hurts your online business and can lead to financial and conversion losses. Let’s dive deeper into what bot traffic is, why most of it is so harmful, and how to avoid it during the busiest time of the year.
What is bot traffic and why should you minimize it?
Bot traffic is any non-human traffic that comes to a website or application. Some of it is good, when it originates from SEO crawlers (like Google's crawl bot), commercial bots, site monitoring bots, or feed bots. Needless to say, all of these do not cause any harm to your site. On the other hand, unwanted bots come with malicious intentions. These can leave spam comments, irrelevant backlinks, strange ads, collect private information, repurpose your content, perform DDoS attacks, and other malicious activities.
How bot traffic affects your website
Malicious bot traffic can have different consequences on your website and business, causing multiple damages:
Damage to the security and availability of the website
Malicious bot traffic harms the security and availability of your website. For example, these massive amounts of traffic to your site are one way hackers can cause a DDoS attack. During such an attack, the traffic is so massive that the server where your site is hosted cannot handle it. This can make your website slow, unreliable, or even unavailable to your users.
Malicious bots are also the main force behind a brute force attack, a way of guessing your password/login details by trying numerous combinations of letters, numbers and symbols. If this type of attack is successful, malicious hackers gain access to your account and/or private information.
Website speed issues
Even if it doesn't lead to massive hacker attacks, malicious bot activity can make your website much slower or even unavailable to your real visitors, affecting their overall user experience. To keep your visitors on your site longer and convert them into customers, you'll want them to have a great user experience. A big part of that is making your website's loading speed as fast as possible.
Analytical Metrics and Chaos in SEO Rankings
Bad bot traffic can also hurt your analytics metrics and SEO rankings. For example, too much bad bot traffic can take your site down and cause 503 (“site is temporarily unavailable”) errors. This directly negatively impacts your SEO rankings. Additionally, bad bots can affect your analytics metrics, causing abnormally high pageviews and bounce rates, sudden drop/increase in session durations, and false conversions. All of these factors can confuse you as a site owner and you may not be able to make sense of your analytics data.
How We Reduced Bad Bot Traffic at SiteGround
At SiteGround, we take multiple measures at different levels to reduce malicious bot activity by default for websites hosted on our servers, giving you peace of mind.
Improved and advanced AI anti-bot system
Our AI anti-bot system has been successfully blocking millions of brute force attempts a day. Recently, we improved it further, resulting in 95% less malicious traffic. Its core features are still there: analyzing and recognizing traffic patterns to eventually stop brute force attempts. With each new brute force attempt, the system's knowledge expands and it gets better at preventing future attacks. Recently, we've upgraded the system with a traffic validation feature that stops even more malicious non-human bots by minimizing the number of brute force attacks. Currently, the system blocks a large percentage of malicious bot traffic to our servers, allowing more capacity for your websites for legitimate traffic.
Combined with our enterprise-grade security system , these server-level israel whatsapp number data security optimizations block the majority of all malicious bot traffic and ensure website protection on a global scale. The numbers speak for themselves: 99.99% of malicious traffic is blocked before it reaches your website.
Intelligent WAF at server level
Hacker attacks typically increase during the Black Friday season. A single outdated plugin, theme, or vulnerability can easily be used for massive damage during this busiest time of the year. That’s where our smart web application firewall comes to the rescue. Our security experts closely monitor security bulletins and server activity 24h, and in case of reported vulnerabilities, they immediately add custom WAF rules (patches) in our server firewall to protect your site from ongoing attacks and breaches due to outdated plugins and other vulnerabilities. Our proactive security approach allows us to react much faster, often before the original plugin, theme, or application developers have had a chance to release an official update. The most recent example of this was last month, with two major ones before that not so far behind: a plugin vulnerability patched on day 0, and a Linux kernel vulnerability patched within hours of detection .
DDoS Protection
To deal with potential DDoS attacks from malicious bots, we have a system of hardware and software mechanisms to protect your sites:
A hardware firewall that filters flood traffic;
A local software firewall with more complex features and traffic monitoring;
A limit on the number of connections a remote host can establish;
A check for a high number of failed login attempts from hosts and filter them out, if any.
What is bot traffic and why should you minimize it?
Bot traffic is any non-human traffic that comes to a website or application. Some of it is good, when it originates from SEO crawlers (like Google's crawl bot), commercial bots, site monitoring bots, or feed bots. Needless to say, all of these do not cause any harm to your site. On the other hand, unwanted bots come with malicious intentions. These can leave spam comments, irrelevant backlinks, strange ads, collect private information, repurpose your content, perform DDoS attacks, and other malicious activities.
How bot traffic affects your website
Malicious bot traffic can have different consequences on your website and business, causing multiple damages:
Damage to the security and availability of the website
Malicious bot traffic harms the security and availability of your website. For example, these massive amounts of traffic to your site are one way hackers can cause a DDoS attack. During such an attack, the traffic is so massive that the server where your site is hosted cannot handle it. This can make your website slow, unreliable, or even unavailable to your users.
Malicious bots are also the main force behind a brute force attack, a way of guessing your password/login details by trying numerous combinations of letters, numbers and symbols. If this type of attack is successful, malicious hackers gain access to your account and/or private information.
Website speed issues
Even if it doesn't lead to massive hacker attacks, malicious bot activity can make your website much slower or even unavailable to your real visitors, affecting their overall user experience. To keep your visitors on your site longer and convert them into customers, you'll want them to have a great user experience. A big part of that is making your website's loading speed as fast as possible.
Analytical Metrics and Chaos in SEO Rankings
Bad bot traffic can also hurt your analytics metrics and SEO rankings. For example, too much bad bot traffic can take your site down and cause 503 (“site is temporarily unavailable”) errors. This directly negatively impacts your SEO rankings. Additionally, bad bots can affect your analytics metrics, causing abnormally high pageviews and bounce rates, sudden drop/increase in session durations, and false conversions. All of these factors can confuse you as a site owner and you may not be able to make sense of your analytics data.
How We Reduced Bad Bot Traffic at SiteGround
At SiteGround, we take multiple measures at different levels to reduce malicious bot activity by default for websites hosted on our servers, giving you peace of mind.
Improved and advanced AI anti-bot system
Our AI anti-bot system has been successfully blocking millions of brute force attempts a day. Recently, we improved it further, resulting in 95% less malicious traffic. Its core features are still there: analyzing and recognizing traffic patterns to eventually stop brute force attempts. With each new brute force attempt, the system's knowledge expands and it gets better at preventing future attacks. Recently, we've upgraded the system with a traffic validation feature that stops even more malicious non-human bots by minimizing the number of brute force attacks. Currently, the system blocks a large percentage of malicious bot traffic to our servers, allowing more capacity for your websites for legitimate traffic.
Combined with our enterprise-grade security system , these server-level israel whatsapp number data security optimizations block the majority of all malicious bot traffic and ensure website protection on a global scale. The numbers speak for themselves: 99.99% of malicious traffic is blocked before it reaches your website.
Intelligent WAF at server level
Hacker attacks typically increase during the Black Friday season. A single outdated plugin, theme, or vulnerability can easily be used for massive damage during this busiest time of the year. That’s where our smart web application firewall comes to the rescue. Our security experts closely monitor security bulletins and server activity 24h, and in case of reported vulnerabilities, they immediately add custom WAF rules (patches) in our server firewall to protect your site from ongoing attacks and breaches due to outdated plugins and other vulnerabilities. Our proactive security approach allows us to react much faster, often before the original plugin, theme, or application developers have had a chance to release an official update. The most recent example of this was last month, with two major ones before that not so far behind: a plugin vulnerability patched on day 0, and a Linux kernel vulnerability patched within hours of detection .
DDoS Protection
To deal with potential DDoS attacks from malicious bots, we have a system of hardware and software mechanisms to protect your sites:
A hardware firewall that filters flood traffic;
A local software firewall with more complex features and traffic monitoring;
A limit on the number of connections a remote host can establish;
A check for a high number of failed login attempts from hosts and filter them out, if any.