Bot Traffic and SEO: What You Need to Know
Bots play an integral role in SEO and digital marketing in general. Search engines like Google use bots, or web crawlers, to discover and index new content. When a bot finds a new piece of content, it “crawls” the page and looks for clues on it to help determine what the page is about.
One of the most important factors in SEO is how often bots crawl your content. If your content isn’t being crawled frequently, it’s not going to rank as well in Google’s search results. In fact, bot traffic is one of the key indicators that Google looks at when determining whether or not to rank a piece of content.
What Is Bot Traffic and How Does It Affect SEO?
Bot traffic is traffic generated by automated scripts, also known as bots. However, these scripts imitate human behavior, making it difficult to distinguish from genuine human traffic.
With that said, there are two types of bot traffic: good and bad.
What Are Good Bots?
Good bot traffic is generated by search engine bots (web crawlers). As we mentioned earlier, these bots are dispatched by search engines like Google to discover and index new content. Good bot traffic helps your content get found and ranked in search results.
In addition to search engine bots, there are other kinds of good bot traffic, such as:
- Site-monitoring bots: These bots help you keep track of your website’s uptime and performance.
- Analytics bots: These bots collect data about your website’s traffic so that you can better understand your audience.
- Social media bots: These bots help you automate your social media marketing efforts. For example, you can use a bot to schedule tweets or Facebook posts in advance.
- Feed bots: These bots help deliver your content to subscribers via RSS feeds.
What Are Bad Bots?
On the other hand, bad bot traffic is generated by malicious scripts designed to harm your website in some way. These scripts can be used for a variety of nefarious purposes, or black hat SEO strategies, such as:
- Scraping content: This is the most common type of bot. It scrapes content from websites and republishes it without permission. This can hurt your SEO because it can result in duplicate content.
- Scraping email: Another kind of scraping bots function by scraping email addresses from websites. This can hurt your website’s reputation because it can lead to spam emails being sent to your subscribers.
- DDoS attacks: Some bots are used to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which overload a website with traffic and cause it to crash.
- Spamming comments: Other malicious bots are used to post spammy comments on blogs and forums. These comments are often linked to malicious websites or other forms of advertising.
- Brute force attacks: Other bots try to guess passwords for websites. This can lead to security breaches if the passwords are not strong enough.
How to Detect Bad Bots on Your Website
Google Analytics is a good start if you want to check your website’s bot traffic. To do this, go to the “Audience” section and then click on “Technology.”
From there, you should see a list of the different types of browsers and devices that are being used to visit your website. If you see any strange or unfamiliar browsers/devices on this list, it’s likely that they’re bad bots.
To get rid of them, you can either block them entirely or just redirect them to another page (such as a 404 error page).
To block a bot, you’ll need to add its IP address to your .htaccess file. If you don’t know how to do this, you can contact your web host and they’ll be able to help you out.
How to Reduce Bad Bot Traffic
Bad bot traffic can harm your website in a number of ways, so it’s important to take steps to reduce it. Here are a few things you can do:
1. Use a security plugin
A security plugin, such as Wordfence, can help you block bad bots from accessing your website. It can also help you identify which bots are hitting your website and where they’re coming from.
2. Use a CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA is a test that humans can pass but bots cannot. Adding a CAPTCHA to your website can help reduce bot traffic, as well as spam comments and brute force attacks.
3. Use a honeypot
A honeypot is a trap for bots. By adding a honeypot to your website, you can trick bots into revealing themselves so that you can block them. One example of a honeypot is a hidden form field that bots fill out but humans will not.
4. Restrict access to your website
You can also reduce bad bot traffic by restricting access to your website. For example, you can password-protect certain pages or use a plugin like CloudFlare to block IP addresses that are known to be associated with malicious bot traffic.
However, this advice should be taken with caution — you wouldn’t want to accidentally block good bots from indexing vital content from your website.
How to Leverage Good Bots for SEO
In addition to reducing bad bot traffic, you can also leverage good bot traffic to help improve your SEO. Here are a few things you can do:
1. Make sure your website is accessible to bots
This means ensuring that your website’s design is clean and simple and that your site’s code is well-organized.
You also need to be careful when using a robots.txt script. This script tells bots what they can and cannot index on your website. If you’re not careful, you could accidentally block good bots from accessing your website. To learn more about how to effectively use robots.txt, you can refer to Google’s comprehensive guide.
2. Use sitemaps
A sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the pages on your website. By adding a sitemap to your website, you can help good bots index your website more easily.
To create a sitemap, you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO or a sitemap generator like XML Sitemaps. Once you’ve created your sitemap, you need to submit it to Google Search Console.
3. Use structured data
Structured data, or schema markup, is a code that helps search engines understand the content on your website.
Setting up structured data can be quite confusing at first, but there are tools you can use to make the process easier. For example, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper can help you create and add structured data to your website.
4. Add new content regularly
Content is the main way for bots to discover and index your website. By regularly adding new content to your website, you can help good bots keep your website crawled and up-to-date, and improve your SEO.
One of the best and most effective ways to add new content to your website is by blogging. Not only does this give you fresh content to share with visitors, but it also helps you attract new ones to your website.
Improve Your SEO with the Right Strategy
Bot traffic can have both a good and a bad impact on your website’s SEO. With the right strategy, you can use good bot traffic to improve your SEO while reducing the impact of bad bot traffic.
If you need help in improving your search engine optimization strategy, or with producing content and strengthening your website’s security, Ilfusion is here for you. We provide reasonably priced and personalized solutions for any kind of brand.
Give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email at [email protected] to get started!
Tags: black hat SEO, bot traffic, search engine optimization, SEOCategorized in: Articles
