Bad Backlinks Can Be Detrimental to Your Business Website, and You Must Block Them

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A lot of business owners, in their urgency, can often resort to using various backlinks from untrusted sources in their posts and their business websites. They think that the quantity of the links they have is more important than the quality of these links. Well, you cannot be more misguided. While backlinks are essential to get more traffic to your website, it is essential that these links are from good sites because if you promote untrusted web sources, then you can be barred from search engines as a penalty. This article will help you to understand how you can block bad bot traffic from inappropriate backlinks to your website.

Good backlinks will make your website more reliable will bad ones will simply degrade the quality of your page. IT will create a bad impression upon visitors who will not trust your content, your business, and your website anymore and will simply stop visiting. Similarly, bad bots will consume your bandwidth, and they will slow your server down, even copy your content away and make your server vulnerable. This has to be stopped.

Bad bots tend to follow the directions of Robots.txt in websites. The text file will contain bots which can be easily identified from the information in the User-Agent fields. By using this text file, you can block a lot of traffic from certain websites and even deny the access to specific directories. For instance, you will be able to block access to every webpage on the site for the “Hum” bot with your robot.txt file like:

User-agent: HumBot

Disallow :/

Bad bots will still try to crawl into your website. You have to identify and block them. Identifying can be done by the following process:

  1. Develop a text file which can write up logs on your server. This file needs to save in the CGI- directory. Give the required permissions for the execution of this particular text file. Start your browser up and then point towards this page. One will be able to read the User Agent string of your browser, along with the HTTP referrer page as well as your IP address. Lastly, you will also see the time that was required to serve the request.
  2. This file needs to link to your indexing page, but it has to hide away from any human visitor. Make a link, which appears like the following:

<a href=” your domain/CGI-bin/bots.pl></a>

This will get you going. This log file can contain all the specific details of bad bots.

You can check this file to find out all the bad bots which have been trying to harm your website and then take more remedial action. You can also take some more steps to prevent bots from accessing your business website.

Option 1:

One would have to analyze the specific IP addresses against particular white lists (you will be required to include your IP address along those of popular search engines available in the particular whitelist). Again, you can also easily block the final IP address through the use of a firewall. Or you can assign the specific User-Agent strings to make a deny list that can give 403 – status(FORBIDDEN). This will use less of your active resources and will be quicker to execute.

Option 2:

Using a .htaccess is also a good option. A .htaccess can be used to block bad bots, provided that you are using an Apache HTTP Server. When you find certain Bad bots using a specific User-Agent string continuously, it will be quite easy to barricade these bots based only on that specific string:

What is organic traffic and why is it important for your business website’s success are questions which plague every business website owner; it is simply essential for you to understand that the more organic traffic your website gets, the better your credibility as a trusted source will be and this will boost your search engine rankings quite a bit.

Wrapping Up

Although it is common knowledge that getting backlinks is essential for the success of your business website and is a driving force behind getting more organic traffic, but it is equally essential that the links you get are from credible, trusted and reliable sources if not reputed websites. Search engines will analyze the backlinks you have, and if they are found to fraudulent then you can have the rankings of your business website considerable depleted and degraded, it can also get your site banned. These are of course detrimental to your business and must be avoided at all costs. Hopefully, the information mentioned in this article will help you to block the bad bot traffic to your website so that only the good links are available.

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.