It is more important than ever now to have fantastic SEO for your website if you want to rank high and successfully attract your target audience and ultimately generate larger sales for your business. Good SEO practice not only improves your ranking and sales but also improves the experience for your website visitors. It is no surprise then that the world of SEO is rather competitive and one way your competitors can try to hinder your SEO is by using automated website attacks.
The function of an online bot is to run automated, repetitive tasks that a human would not be able or have the time to do. Bots are not always built to be bad some are good and search engines use bots to collect data to enhance their search index.
SEO (good) Bots
Good, or SEO bots help to boost your website rankings on search engines and assist with gaining online authority. These bots have a certain pattern that they follow and are regulated and modified. They are usually search engine bots that are crawlers, these bots extract URLS and data.
Bad (Malicious) Bots
Bad bots are usually created by hackers or business competitors with the aim of automated attacks. They can take your content, pricing and information and use spam and other automated attacks to harm your business and damage your SERP ranking (Search engine result page.) Here are the ways that bad bots can harm SEO rankings for your site:
Form Spamming – Unwanted information is submitted by malicious bots via web forms with the aim of phishing.
Price Scraping – Real-time theft from a website of its pricing data relating to services or products offered. Competitors can use this to ensure they are one step ahead.
Web Scraping – Forms submitted repeatedly to spam the site with fake leads. This can lead to the site being removed from search engines.
Alter Analytics – Incorrect numbers could be reported by bad bots leading to uninformed and poor decision making by marketing and analytic teams.
The most efficient and quickest method of stopping bad bots is to use a real-time bot management system. Call Green Tornado on 01277 849161 for more information.
