It is known now that you want to make as much of your content as easy as possible for Google to crawl your website. However, there are instances that it is a good idea to block bots. Bots are relatively harmless to you and your website. For example you will want Google’s bots to crawl and index your web pages so you can be ranked faster. The other side of it bots can provide unwanted traffic and mess with reports. There are good bots that run in the background safely and bad bots that can break security and can be used as an attack.
With that being said let us go back to square one. What is a bot? It is important to know what a bot is and why it can be important to know when to block them.
What is a bot?
Bot is known for being short for robot. Their sole job is to repeatedly preform a task that they were programmed to do. For many SEO professionals understanding and utilizing bot activity is part of scaling or optimizing their SEO campaign. Which in short just means automating their work to get better results at a faster pace.
Misconceptions
you may have heard that all bots are bad and you should avoid them at all cost or from an SEO point of view to block all interaction with them. Truth of the matter is that is a myth. Google is a bot and if you were planning on blocking all bots you would have a tough time with your SEO ranking. However, the truth of bots is that they pose great benefits with automating tasks to make life easier in the SEO world. You should still be aware of what is on your pages and how vulnerable it can be. Let’s go over what to do to protect your data from unwanted bots.
Why You Would Need to Block Bots From Your Site
Vicious bots can be used to steal private data or even take down a whole website. It is not easy to find every bot that wonders on to your website. With a little digging you can keep away the malicious ones. Other ways bots may affect your website is by spamming links or contact form submissions on your site. This can leave you with a headache when it comes time to look into reports and data from your site. Bots can even be costing you money out of you or your companies money. Every time there is an increase in bot traffic it can drive up your bandwidth which can translate to overages or charges.
Reasons to block out bots:
- Spamming (links, or contact form submissions)
- Bandwidth overage
- Bad Behavior
- Protecting Data
How to Block Bots Effectively
There are two useful methods to blocking bots. One option is through robot.txt which is a file that sits on your web server. It is common to have to build one on your own as they are not there by default. With robot.txt you can utilize it to block Google completely, disallowing all bots on your site, and keeping bots from crawling specific folders. The other option is to use your HTACCESS file. This can be helpful if you are on APACHE web server. However, be careful using this code as it can bring down your whole server if done wrong. Robot.txt is a lot friendlier to your website as it is more commonly used.
Looking for Higher Google Rankings? Contact Us Today!
If you are interested in finding out more about the affects of utilizing bots for your website do not hesitate to contact our expert team at Boston Web Marketing. Our team will guide you to better navigate your files to protect your information from malicious bots to ensure the right analytics is collected. If you are interested in getting in touch with us call us at (857)-526-0096 or email us at sales@getfoundquick.com we look forward to talking to you!