How to Stop Bots from Crawling Your Site in 7 Easy Ways

Working on your website requires understanding how search engines perform, including crawling and indexing. To gain information about your site, a search engine like Google has a bot named web crawler. 

Web crawling is the process by which these bots systematically browse the internet to discover and analyze the content and structure of the pages. Yet, you may want to stop Google bot crawlers from crawling your site.

Preventing bots from crawling your site can be done because of several reasons, such as security risks, resource usage, and others. In this article, you will figure out how to stop bots from crawling your site. So, make sure you stick to the end!

What Is a Web Crawler?

The web crawler is a bot that scans the internet to gather data for uses like SEO. They can read parameter values, evaluate navigational lines, extract data from web applications, debug, etc.

Even though not all crawlers are bad, like Googlebot which crawls your site for ranking purposes, there are also pointless bots that can do the crawling too. These bots are usually malicious bots that scrap your content, affect your SEO efforts, and degrade your site performance. 

Therefore, you should prevent these bots from accessing your site to protect your data from content scraping and data stealing, maintain the website's performance, and block them from accessing confidential parts of your site. 

Then, how to identify these bad crawlers? Bots usually crawl through the site's HTML. They frequently browse pages far more quickly than people do. A bot is probably working if you observe pages loading abnormally quickly, especially if it happens in milliseconds.

Additionally, it can also be a bot if you see traffic to your website originating from sites other than any particular source. Bots frequently avoid these common paths and arrive on your site without a clear point of entry, unlike human visitors who might find their way there through a search engine or a link from another website.

How to Stop Bots from Crawling Your Site?

If you wonder how to stop bots from crawling your site, you actually can do some activities to prevent them from accessing your site. The explanation below reveals ways to prevent bots from crawling your site:

1. Utilise Robots.txt

The first way is to use robots.txt to tell search engines and other bots which pages on your website should not be crawled. Then, how to use robots.txt to stop the crawlers? You can create a plain text file as follows:

This informs any bot to avoid exploring any pages on your website. Furthermore, you can ban specific pages and define the user agent for each bot to block those particular ones. Remember that disabling all bots will negatively impact your SEO.

2. Block the IP Addresses

Next, you can block an IP address if you are getting a lot of traffic from it and want to stop more traffic coming from it. To do so, you can utilise a security plugin on your website or use the firewall on your server.

3. Employ CAPTCHAs

Completely Automated Public Turing or CAPTCHAs stop malicious bots from automatically crawling websites through tasks that are simple for humans to accomplish but challenging for automated scripts.

When used properly, CAPTCHA may drastically reduce the amount of bot traffic to your website and is an excellent resource for distinguishing humans from automated programs. 

4. Use HTTP Authentication

HTTP Authentication is an additional line of defence against bots that restricts authenticated users' access to specific web pages or directories. You can stop most bots from crawling your site by making access to it require a username and password.

5. Implement Hypertext Access File

Hypertext Access Files, or .htaccess files, are configuration documents used by web servers that run on Apache allowing you to modify and control the behaviour of the server for each directory.

You can block access for particular IP addresses or user agents by using directives in your .htaccess file. This is helpful if you want to stop specific bots from visiting your website without having to make adjustments to several different areas.

6. Utilise Referrer Spam Blockers

Referrer spam is bot traffic that originates from fake websites and appears in your site's analytics. If you want to block this bot, you can use referrer spam blockers because they restrict certain referrer domains from reaching your website.

7. Use a Bot Management Solution

Bot management solution is a specialized bot protecting your site from malicious bots and regulating which bots are permitted to crawl your website and the frequency of their visits.

Moreover, bot management systems distinguish normal human behaviour patterns from bots using machine learning and behaviour-based bot identification approaches. 

Not only provides current data and information about the kind of bot behaviours occurring on your website, but it also lets you tailor responses like banning, restricting, or rerouting bot traffic.

Conclusion

Those are how to prevent bots from your website tactics you can adhere to avoid security risks and maintain website performance. When it comes to ranking on search results, you must ensure that your site is user-friendly, accessible, and credible. In this case, SEO can help your site accomplish that. 

However, it can be challenging if you do not have the proper resources and teams. You do not have to worry about this because SEO Services by cmlabs can help you with your SEO needs, from content creation, site optimisation, link building, and many more. Talk in a meeting about your SEO needs now for free!