How to prevent your website from spammers/bots?
Published: 2019-06-24 10:59:17

If there's one problem that drives website owners insane, it's none other than Spam. Website owners have to deal with spammers' activities on a daily basis and it has remained a frustrating issue over the years. You might have noticed a sudden increase in your web traffic sometimes, only to realize that it is unwanted, coming from a bot's end.

You may, sometimes, receive spam traffic in the form of bulk email subscriptions, forgot password requests, customer signups, etc. which increases the load on the server and affects the website's performance. The SMTP server starts sending the emails to the fake email addresses, causing your SMTP emails to land in the spam folder, which is surely not good for your business.

Robots, web crawlers use the Internet as much as humans. While a human's purpose can somehow be understood, the same can't be said about a bot. But bots aren't always bad.

<b>How do you differ a good bot from a bad one?</b>

While a good bot helps you in indexing your website on the search engine and monitors your website's performance, a bad bot, on the other hand, tries to degrade your content by repeatedly posting spam comments, links, messages, and fake sign-ups. They just hit and leave your store, resulting in an increased bounce rate. Increased bounce rate indicates that the users are not engaging with your content and hurts the ranking of your store on the SERP. Even the fake sign-ups can cause trouble for your email list as sending emails to the fake email addresses will increase the bounce rate of your email campaigns and users will likely unsubscribe to your emails. This also creates high chances of your promotional emails getting marked as spam by the spam filters.

<b>How to get rid of bots/spammers?</b>

If you have permitted the comment section on your website, you are bound to receive spam, and as your store grows popular, this becomes a larger issue. Unfortunately, there's no way yet to get rid of the spammers completely, however, you can try some ways to minimze it.

There are plenty of methods available that can do a lot to slow down the spam process on your website, however, some of them require a bit of technical knowledge. which might make the task difficult for you. If you do not want to get involved in much coding stuff, we have a solution for you.

If you want the spam removal process to be easy, you can look for <b>"Block Bot/User addon" by Knowband</b> that prevents bots/users from spreading malicious content on your website by blocking their IP address, Country or User Agent. Knowband provides Block Bot/User addon for various stores. Check them out-

<a href="https://www.knowband.com/prestashop-block-bot-user-ip-country-user-agent">Knowaband's Block Bot/User addon for Prestashop</a>
<a href="https://www.knowband.com/opencart-block-bot-user-ip-country-user-agent">Knowband's Block Bot/User extension for OpenCart</a>
<a href="https://www.knowband.com/magento-block-bot-user-ip-country-user-agent">Knowband's Block Bot/User extension for Magento</a>

Let's look at how this addon helps to prevent your website from bots/spammers-

<b>Block spammers by IP</b>

With the help of the spam blocker addon, you can block the IP address of the users that you suspect to be sending spam/bots to your store. All you need to do is either enter the complete IP address of the suspect or you can use * to check all the similar IPs lying in that range and block them from accessing your store.

<b>Block spammers from specific countries</b>

If you feel you are receiving spam traffic from the countries whom you do not offer any service, you can simply block those countries from accessing your website. Just enter the name of the country in the "Block by Country" tab and get this job done. You can block countries that are not relevant for your business even if you are receiving a high volume of content from those regions to reduce the bounce rate of your store.

<b>Block by User-Agent</b>

You can prevent access to your store from User agents like Chrome, Mozilla, Bingbot, etc. In the "Block by User Agent" tab, you can mention the user agent and this addon will never allow them to settle down on your store.

<b>Unblock real visitors</b>

If by mistake, you block a genuine user, you have the option to unblock them. Wondering how would you be able to know that the blocked user is genuine?
Well, this spam blocker module allows banned users to make a block removal request, which you can see later from the back-end of your store. Seeing the manual request, you would be able to identify that the user is genuine and not any bot.

This addon helps you to-

<b>Remove unwanted traffic from bots/spammers.</b>

<b>Drive real and quality traffic.</b>

<b>Keep your website safe from malware.</b>

Apart from this addon, you can also consider using <b>Google reCaptcha</b>. You can install and enable the Google reCaptcha addon by Knowband on your store to add an extra security layer on your website. The Google reCaptcha extension helps you to prevent spam traffic by adding the reCaptcha protection on the Customer Login Page, Customer Registration Page, Customer Contact Page, Customer Forgotten Password Page.

Google reCaptcha addon is specifically designed to verify whether your site visitors are humans or robots. It is an effective way to counter with spammers/bots. You can try

<a href="https://www.knowband.com/prestashop-google-recaptcha">Google reCaptcha addon for Prestashop</a>
<a href="https://www.knowband.com/opencart-google-recaptcha">Google reCaptcha extension for OpenCart</a>

The Google reCaptcha module will soon be available for Magento and Magento 2.

<b>Key Features of the Google reCaptcha addon</b>

1. Google reCaptcha creates a verification process on your store and prevents spam sign-ups.

2. Google reCaptcha plugin permits only real and genuine users to access your store.

3. Google reCaptcha addon helps you drive quality content on your website.
4. It improves your website's security.

5. You can enable Google reCaptcha for the customer login page, customer registration page, contact page and forgot password page.

6. Google reCaptcha extension is SSL compatible.

7. Google reCaptcha module addon is compatible with all themes.

<b>Conclusion</b>

Spammers take no time in cluttering your website. They make it unprofessional and turn away the real visitors. Hence, you should strongly consider taking some strict actions to prevent your website from malicious activities.
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