How to block legitimate and illegitimate bots from crawling and scraping your...

ApalloSaute

The Martech Zone continues to grow in popularity in recent weeks… and with it, it's also becoming a hot spot for hackers and bots. Last week I was notified by my hosting company that my website was hit by what appeared to be a DDoS attack, but it came from a user agent called claudbot. It hit my site so hard that they had to move it to a new server, which would have cost six times as much. I have no idea what this bot is or who unleashed it on my site, so my host helped me block it with a .htaccess file.

Websites are constantly being visited by different Finland Phone Number Database types of bots, some legitimate and some malicious. These bots can consume significant server resources, slow down website performance, and even scrape valuable content for competitive analysis. When a bot slows down your website, it affects the user experience (UX) of your visitors and can seriously affect your search engine rankings if it is ongoing.

As a company, it is essential to understand how to block both legitimate and illegitimate bots to protect your website and ensure optimal performance for your human visitors.

Blocking legitimate bots
Legitimate bots, such as bots from search engines and SEO tools, can strain your server's resources if unchecked. You may also not want an SEO bot to capture and provide detailed information about your content and pages on their platform to your competitors.

While these bots serve their purpose, their aggressive crawling behavior can negatively impact your site's performance. To mitigate this problem, you can use your .htaccess file to block specific bots based on their user agent strings.