“Bot” is now a very common term in the online ecosystem. From Social Media to E-Commerce and while discussing about website traffic, Bots are everywhere. But Bots, specifically the Bad Bots are damaging your online business.
Online businesses who are getting revenues only through their strong online presence are always at the risk of Bot attacks. These bots are continuously after your unique contents, site metrics, database details and so. According to a report, published by Distil Security, “Bad Bots comprises of 46% of the total internet traffic.”
Bad Bots these days are too common but are you aware of the potential damage the Bad Bots can cause your business? Knowing about the damage bad bots can cause to your business, you can easily secure your business against the potential threat. Here is a list of 5 ways by which Bad Bots are hurting your website:
- Data Scraping/Content Theft— Bots run extensively through websites 24*7. They then “scrape” unique content from the website and repost it different sites without giving any back link or credit then illicitly repost it on other sites. Duplicacy lowers Google page rank.
Lower Pagerank = Lower Visitor = Lower Sales = Lower Revenue
When your keywords ranking goes down and you are not on the first page of Google ranking, the traffic reduces massively. As a result lower visitor’s turnouts to your page and respectively it lowers the sales and you end up with huge revenue loss.
- Credential Cracking
Credential cracking is a technique used by bot administrators when they possess a username but not the password. Using brute force dictionary lookups and multiple guessing attempts, bots arrive at the missing credential piece. Bots then validate credentials and takeover the accounts on different sites where the same credentials are used.
- Ad Fraud
What if all the clicks on your PPC Ads are from Bots? All your budget will exhaust with zero potential clients visiting your website. Bots won’t generate any kind of business for the advertiser. Ad fraud costs business a significant loss if left unchecked.
Examples of digital ad fraud include:
- Impression fraud
- Click fraud
- Retargeting
- Spamming
Bots stuffing your forms with Garbage data & as a result important messages are left unnoticed. Bots even spam on comments & user messages by adding hate or malicious data. Spamming also includes fake account creation on website.
Google reCAPTCHAs prevents spamming but only up-to a certain extent as CAPTCHA farms and sophisticated bots can easily solve Google reCAPTCHAs.
- Skewing-Fake Traffic
Site metrics are the most important factors to analyze performance and develop strategies. So, every bot interaction skews the metrics of the website. Generating fake traffic is one of the prominent ways of skewing the metric. No matter, what the bot does, when businesses will perform A/B page testing they will not be able to analyze the genuine results. They won’t be able to figure out the effectiveness of marketing spend and determine future plans.
Important site metrics for businesses includes which page or product received maximum impression, location wise traffic, time spent on website, no of unique visitors v/s no of repeated visitors.
Fake Traffic also increases server load and your website might get down too.
Bot Security is now the necessity of almost B2C businesses, from aviation to finance, from defense to e-commerce. Around the Globe, Distil Networks have been marked as the No.1 Bot Security Company. Other major competitors are Akamai, ShiedSquare, Datadome. In India, there are only a few companies who are into Bot Security, Trident Analytical Solutions is one such Bot Security company. For a successful and long lasting presence protection against Bad Bots is the most necessary step.
A Modern Bot Security offers:
- Dynamic Scripting: Script that changes on every request making it impossible for Bots to find a stable solution.
- JavaScript code Obfuscation: Jumbled Java code so that no Bot can copy the source code.
- 5 Captcha Solution: Where everyone uses 2 captcha solutions, 5 captcha solutions provides much comprehensive security.
- AI: Bot security based on AI (self-learning algorithm) to identify bot patterns and block them.
Wrapping up:
Not all Bots are harmful for your business. Google crawler itself is a bot which help your business. The threat to your business is bad bots. Bot Security, which wasn’t given much priority like a decade back, is now the basic necessity of businesses especially B2C to survive their businesses in the long run. Manual efforts are not enough for security against bots.
About Author:-
Lakshman Jack is a content handler and blogger who loves to write on the quality of topics like Technology, Social Media recycling for their readers and followers. Jack has a fantastic ability to make the most complex subject matter easy to understand.
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