Semalt: How To Block Bots From Hitting Your Website

23.05.2018

Semalt: How To Block Bots From
Hitting Your Website

Bots are basically the fake and automated programs that surf your website to perform a variety of tasks. It is a short
form of robots and can damage your site to a great extent. Some of the examples of bots are those that have been
blacklisted by the search engines. Some bots visit your websites and send you spam in a large number, while others
probe your sites for security vulnerabilities. Before you block bots from seeing your site, it is important that you
host your website on an Apache web server. Plus, your web host must provide you with the facility of ".htaccess
overrides, " and you would have to enable it as early as possible. You would have to check the site's raw weblogs and
get your site hosted with a commercial web host.

Ross Barber, the Customer Success Manager of Semalt, elaborates in the article on some practical tips in this
regard.

Blocking unwanted bots

It's safe to say that blocking unwanted bots is like you are trying to get rid of the viruses or pests. You can block the
bots only when you have fully identi ed them. First, you have to determine the IP address where the bots are
coming from. For this, you can download your weblog from the web host, uncompress it with the help of archives
and open in a plain text editor. Here you can observe whether real humans or bots are visiting your site. The next
step is to locate the entries that belong to the bots and look for the user agent strings.

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23.05.2018

Note the IP addresses used by the bots

Most often, people do not know how to record the IP addresses used by the bots.
Be careful while doing this thing as your site can be damaged if you don't block
those IPs as early as possible. Some viruses and malware might infect your
computers or mobile devices while you are blocking the bots. If you see that the
same bots are coming from same or different IP addresses, you must prevent all
of them within minutes and refresh your web browser.

Download Your .htaccess File

It is another way to get rid of bots and the fake traf c. You must download your .htaccess les using an FTP or SFTP
client. For this, you should visit the top web directory of your website, where the homepage links are located. Here
you can nd this le and download it at your earliest. If you don't nd this le here, then you can locate it
somewhere else depending on the FTP program you use.

Open or Create the .htaccess File

Once you have located the le, the next step is to open it and adjust its
settings. Create blank documents and paste its data over there. For
blocking a speci c IP, say, 127.0.0.1, you should add it to your .htaccess

le and click the Block button.

To block bots by user agent strings, you should look for the strings with
the robot and the ones that contain ordinary letters of the alphabet with
no space, slash, and punctuation mark. Once you have located it, you can
easily block it within your device and can keep your website safe.

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