Nearly half of all web traffic worldwide generated by bots are many different types of internet bots used for other purposes, a sizable amount of Google Analytics bot traffic generated by bad bots or ad fraud companies with destructive intentions. Good bots can offer beneficial services. For instance, Googlebot and Bingbot play a role in indexing your website by the two search engines so potential clients can find you.
How Bot Traffic Affects Your Business?
Bot traffic adversely impacts your company by causing poor business decisions, worse site performance, and lower search engine ranks, all of which can result in competitive disadvantages. Automated traffic strains your system and raises your bandwidth and compute cycle costs. Bot traffic or ad fraud companies can overburden your network and site performance, which annoys users and degrades their experience. The speed of your website affects where it appears in search results, according to search engines. Due to bot traffic, your website may rank lower in search results may prevent customers from finding you.
The Effects of Bad Bots on Your Online Presence
Because they expressly and methodically created to carry out malicious assaults, including brute force/credential stuffing attacks, web scraping, and massive DDoS attacks, bad bots are extremely dangerous. Bot attacks may negatively affect your company in a variety of ways, including but not limit
Stolen Sensitive Information
Without your consent, content scraper bots may take and reuse your content. Worse yet, if they have access to your database, they may take private user information from it might subject you to legal repercussions and harm your reputation over time. If your users’ credit card information is not adequately protected, some bots are even sophisticated enough to harvest it.
Site Speed Slowdown
Bot activity on your website will increase the load on your server, affecting performance and perhaps slowing down your site. Visitors may leave your site if the page loads slowly could eventually harm your site’s SEO performance.
Your Site Spammed With False Links
Forms, comment sections, and other user-generated input-enabled elements of your website or platform can all abused by spambots. They frequently contain connections to scam or fraudulent websites, which can damage your reputation and lead to Google penalties for your website.
Inflating Your Costs & Analytics
Bots may increase the cost of your advertising and impair the general operations of your website. Because they believe you have increased traffic, even if it is coming from bots, ad publishers may charge significantly more for the ad space. Sending bot traffic to advertisers will damage your reputation as a publisher if you don’t stop malicious bots.
Making Your Competitive Advantage Unusable
The unpalatable truth is that hackers may work for or sell your data to competitors, which might cost you a crucial competitive edge. It is particularly prevalent in sectors where a product’s price availability may make or break a company, such as websites that sell tickets, travel websites.
Blocking bad bots
For two reasons, stopping a bot isn’t always the best course of action when managing its activities: We might not want a bot to be aware that it has been found and stopped. To squander resources and deceive the bot’s operators, you enable bot to function as usual while feeding it false material and data. Another option is to point the bot to a different page that looks similar but has thin or phoney content instead.