Semalt Explains Why One Should Block Bots And Website Crawlers

It's safe to say that a lot of views that come to your website are from non-human and non-genuine sources, and that's not ok because you have to get rid of it if you want to see your website growing for a lifetime. If you feel that bot traffic is good and reliable, you are making a big mistake as it can lead Google to disable your AdSense account. Most often, the bots are visible as human traffic in Google Analytics, but it wasn't the case months ago. These days, more than seventy percent of the traffic generated by small websites is from bots and fake sources. Max Bell, the Semalt expert, warns you that bots always try to get to your site in a plenty of ways, and it may not be possible for you to get rid of them.

Good Bots

A significant number of bots that visit your sites are nothing more than fake and useless; even they are useful for your web pages if they come in a small amount. Some of the good bots, for example, are used by Google itself to discover new content online. Almost all search engines use good bots to identify the quality of articles. The way they determine the quality has been changed, now they resort to the use of the massive swarm software services. The swarms follow links, jump from one site to another, and index new and changed content. Google bots are complicated, with deep sets of rules that can govern their behavior. For example, the NoFollow command on the links makes them less effective and invisible to Google bots.

Bad Bots

Bad bots are those that ruin your site and cannot give any benefit. They are intentionally searched out and get indexed automatically. Your content is displayed to both humans and bots, ignoring the quality and authenticity. The bad bots ignore robot directives and don't use IP blocks to maintain the quality of your web pages. One of the biggest problems with these bots is that the content is difficult to index and it remains hidden from the public while remaining open for the hackers who might access your files to get your system compromised. There are spam bots too which can damage your site's overall performance. They fill your site with predefined messages, making the affiliate marketers feel bad.

Should You Block Bots?

If you are constantly receiving views from good bots, they might not be needed to get blocked. But if you are receiving views from the bad bots, you might consider blocking them. You should block the Googlebot, which is there to remove your site from the search engine results. On the other hand, you should definitely block spambots. If you are conscious about the protection of your site from DDOSing, it is necessary to block the IP addresses of the bots and spammers. Always remember that the bad bots would never care about your robot.txt files, which is very unfortunate since the protection of this file is mandatory for your site's growth and its overall performance.