How to Combat Spam on Your Site?

Contents show

If your site is well optimized, then you will most likely have a lot of visitors. Whether you know it or not, the big part of site traffic is probably not even humans but spambots crawling all of your web pages. Can spambots harm your website, and is there any way to block bots that are jeopardizing your company’s budget and security? Let us answer these questions further in this post.

Are Spambots Dangerous?

Thanks to advances in technology, the number of automated bots has increased significantly. Sometimes they do a good job; however, there are still many bad bots that can get you in real trouble. The latter can harm your ad campaigns, affect key site performance stats, or even put the security of your online resource under threat. In this context, you may have heard about the IP blacklist check and blacklist strategies aimed at reducing the number of spambots.

Here’s a list of the bad things that spambots might cause and that you can prevent by implementing protective measures on your end:

Data mining for competitive purposes;
Brute force attacks;
Hacking accounts;
Stealing content;
Sending/posting spam content;
Login to accounts.

How to Block Spambots on Your Website

Unfortunately, there is no single effective way to protect your site from spambots. But there are a couple of things that you can do to prevent or effectively cope with the problem:

Use CAPTCHA;
Block hosting providers and proxy services you do not know;
Protect hotspots from spambots;
Analyze your traffic sources;
Identify and measure surges in traffic;
Flag failed login attempts;
Be aware of public data leaks.

The behavior of bots is so sophisticated that it is sometimes difficult to handle the issue with all the traditional security measures. When blocking bots is taking longer than expected, then it’s time to bring in more severe measures.

Blocking robots is as easy as shelling pears if you implement the below strategies:

Blacklist of individual IP addresses or entire ranges of IP addresses;
Set up CAPTCHA tasks to catch potential threats;
Use settings to limit or exclude comments.

Benefits of Blocking Spambots

There are many good things that you can achieve by blocking spambots on your web pages:

Reducing server load – The load on the server decreases, which means that the speed of loading the site for real users goes high. This leads to the improvement of the behavioral factor, SEO position, and sales;
Hacker protection – Hackers scan websites looking for vulnerabilities and modules with bugs. With spambot protection, you ensure that important information is protected from hacking;
Protecting content from parsing – You can block bots from stealing your content and publishing it on their websites. Thus, you keep the uniqueness of the content and images on your site;
Password guessing protection – When trying to brute-force passwords for the CMS administrator part, the software detects a brute-force attack and blocks all attempts to brute-force passwords;
Spam blocking – You can block spambots that register accounts on your site, send spam through the on-site form, or post spam comments.

All the above can be achieved with the help of a dedicated anti-spam solution. However, the challenge is always to block spambots but to allow good bots to do their job, helping you grow your business and generate profits. Of course, there are a few things you can do yourself to protect yourself from clicks, but the above approaches will help you keep your eyes on the ball.