Bot Mitigation – Proactive Measures to Stop Bots

Key Take Aways

1. Bots can harm display ad websites by inflating ad impressions and clicks, leading to wasted advertiser budgets and distorted analytics.
2. Implementing tools like CAPTCHA, firewalls, IP blacklisting, rate limiting, and behavioral analysis is crucial for protecting websites from malicious bots.
3. Cloudflare provides easy-to-use tools to filter out malicious bots, helping to secure websites and conserve resources without needing advanced technical skills.

What Are Bots?

A bot is an automated program designed to perform tasks online without human involvement. These tasks can range from the mundane, such as crawling websites to index them for search engines, to more complex functions like executing trades in financial markets. While some bots are beneficial and serve legitimate purposes, others can be harmful, especially when it comes to websites that rely on monetizing their content through display advertising.

Why Are Bots Bad for Display Ad Websites?

For websites that earn revenue through display ads, bot traffic presents a significant challenge. Display ads are typically sold on a cost-per-impression (CPM) or cost-per-click (CPC) basis, meaning advertisers pay based on how many times an ad is viewed or clicked. Bots can mimic human behavior by generating fake impressions or clicking on ads, which inflates the numbers reported to advertisers. This fraudulent activity causes advertisers to pay for interactions that have no real value, as they do not reach actual, potential customers. The consequences are twofold: advertisers waste their budgets on meaningless interactions, and the website’s analytics are distorted, leading to misguided decisions about content and marketing strategies.

Moreover, the presence of bots can undermine the trust between advertisers and website publishers. If advertisers suspect that a significant portion of the traffic is non-human, they may reduce their ad spending, switch to other platforms, or demand stricter verification measures. This erosion of trust can lead to reduced revenue for the website, as advertisers become more cautious and selective about where they place their ads. In severe cases, a website could be blacklisted, further reducing its potential to generate income through ads.

In addition to financial implications, bot traffic can also harm the overall user experience. Bots can slow down website performance by consuming bandwidth and server resources, making it harder for genuine users to access content. This degradation in performance can lead to higher bounce rates and lower user engagement, which further impacts a site’s ability to monetize effectively. For these reasons, combating bot traffic is crucial for websites that rely on display ads for revenue, as it helps maintain the integrity of their traffic data, protects advertiser relationships, and ensures a better experience for real users.

In the modern digital landscape, bots present an ever-growing threat to website owners. To keep your website safe and operating as it should for your human visitors, you need to have strategies in place to mitigate the impact that bots will have on the site’s performance.

But what should those measures look like, and how are they implemented? Fortunately, you don’t have to be a master coder to put some quality measures in place to limit the harm that bots can do to your corner of the internet. Let’s take a closer look below.

Two Different Categories of Bots

The term “bot” tends to have something of a negative connotation, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, many of the bots that land on your site will be perfectly harmless – in fact, you want them to come check out your site, as they can be helpful to your growth.

The primary category of “good” bots is those that are crawling the web on behalf of search engines. In order for a search engine to know what is on your site – and to decide where your content should be ranked for various search terms – it needs to explore the site and record the content. This is the work of search engine indexing bots. You likely don’t want to stop these bots from getting to your site, as doing so could make you virtually invisible on the web.

On the other hand, there are plenty of malicious bots out there, as well. These are the ones you want to stop. They will do things like scrape your data, spam your site, perform brute-force attacks, and more. You need to find a way to allow the good bots through while keeping the bad ones out, and that is an ongoing challenge that will require you to use a variety of techniques and technologies.

Step #1 – Start with CAPTCHA

The simplest form of bot deterrence – and one you are certainly familiar with already – is CAPTCHA. These are the quick little “tests” that you have to take as a part of using some websites. While they might add a bit of friction for the user and can be a little annoying at times, they work wonders in terms of preventing bots from causing problems on websites.

Basically, the whole point of CAPTCHA is to confirm that the action being taken on a website is coming from an actual human. So, if you have a form on your website that you want users to fill out, you might be getting spammed by tons of bot submissions rather than those from humans. If you add a CAPTCHA in front of that form submission, you can dramatically cut down on – or even eliminate – the bot responses. This will save you tons of time and energy as you’ll be able to focus your attention on the real humans who want to get in touch.

It’s pretty easy for most website owners to implement a CAPTCHA system on their sites, and this is an affordable way to combat bots. More advanced versions also exist, usually called reCAPTCHA, that are attractive because they don’t present the user friction that is provided by the original version.

How to Implement CAPTCHAs

To freely install and use CAPTCHA on your website, you can utilize Google’s reCAPTCHA service, which offers a straightforward setup. First, visit the Google reCAPTCHA website, sign in with your Google account, and register your website by providing its domain name. Google will then provide you with a site key and a secret key. Next, integrate the reCAPTCHA widget into your website by adding the provided JavaScript code to your site’s HTML, typically within the form you want to protect. Finally, configure your backend to verify the reCAPTCHA response using the secret key, ensuring that only human users can successfully submit the form. This setup effectively blocks bots while keeping the process easy for genuine users.

Step #2 – Implement a Robust Firewall

Another step toward better results can be taken through the use of a WAF system, or a web application firewall. This is a tool that will analyze the traffic that is requesting to visit your site and will block those that show signs of being suspicious for one reason or another. One common example of suspicious activity would be a wave of requests coming into the server over and over again from the same IP address.

To get good results with a WAF, it’s necessary to pay attention to the settings and adjust them regularly to make sure the system is working as it should. The last thing you want to do is block out legitimate traffic while trying to stop bots, so this is a tool that can take a bit of tweaking to get it just right.

Step #3 – IP Blacklisting and Whitelisting

Another option is to use IP blacklisting to keep away bots that are coming from IP addresses known for bot activity. There are automated tools that do this kind of work so the demands on your time and effort are minimal. Just as with WAF, however, you don’t want to accidentally blacklist real users, so care is required.

Blacklist Malicious IPs: Identify and block IP addresses known to be associated with bots or malicious activity. You can use publicly available lists of bad IPs or develop your own based on traffic analysis.

Whitelist Trusted IPs: To avoid blocking legitimate traffic, consider whitelisting IPs from trusted sources, such as your business partners or known users.

Step #4 – Rate Limiting

Rate limiting is a crucial strategy for website owners looking to protect their sites from the detrimental effects of bot traffic. At its core, rate limiting involves controlling the frequency with which requests are allowed to reach your server from a single IP address or user. This approach is essential in preventing bots from overwhelming your site with a high volume of requests in a short period, which can lead to performance issues, denial of service, or fraudulent activity.

The primary goal of rate limiting is to restrict the number of requests that an IP address can make within a specific time frame. By setting thresholds, you can effectively prevent bots from bombarding your server with requests. For example, you might configure your server to only allow a certain number of requests per minute from a single IP. Once this threshold is reached, any further requests can be denied or delayed. This helps maintain your server’s stability and ensures that genuine users can access your site without interruption.

Rate limiting not only protects your website from potential crashes caused by an influx of bot traffic but also conserves bandwidth and resources that would otherwise be wasted on processing illegitimate requests. By controlling the flow of incoming traffic, you can ensure that your website remains responsive and accessible to real users, which is especially important during peak traffic times or in the event of an attack.

In addition to setting limits on the number of requests, it’s also effective to implement progressive challenges for users who exceed normal usage patterns. Progressive challenges are designed to gradually increase the difficulty for users to continue making requests once they reach a certain threshold. For instance, if a user exceeds the predefined rate limit, you can first introduce a CAPTCHA challenge. CAPTCHAs are designed to differentiate between human users and bots by presenting tasks that are easy for humans but difficult for automated scripts.

If the user continues to make requests at an unusual rate, despite the initial challenge, you can escalate the response by temporarily slowing down the server’s response times for that particular user. This technique, often referred to as “throttling,” makes it less appealing for bots to persist in their activity, as the returns diminish with each successive request. Throttling can be a highly effective deterrent, especially when combined with CAPTCHAs or other challenge-response mechanisms.

Step #5 – Employ Behavioral Analysis

Behavioral analysis has become an increasingly essential tool in the fight against bot traffic, particularly as bots become more sophisticated and harder to detect using traditional methods. Unlike static defenses, which rely on predefined rules or signatures, behavioral analysis focuses on understanding and interpreting the actions of users on your website. By closely monitoring how users interact with your site, you can identify patterns that distinguish real human behavior from automated bot activity, allowing for more precise and effective bot detection.

One of the primary strategies in behavioral analysis is tracking user behavior in a detailed and granular manner. This involves monitoring how users navigate your website, including actions such as mouse movements, scrolling patterns, clicks, and interaction timing. Human users tend to exhibit natural, often unpredictable patterns of behavior—such as pausing to read content, hovering over links, or scrolling at varying speeds. Bots, on the other hand, often follow more mechanical or repetitive patterns, lacking the subtle nuances of human interaction.

For example, a bot might click through pages at a consistent, rapid pace without any pauses, or it may interact with every clickable element on a page in a systematic order—behaviors that are atypical for a human user. By capturing and analyzing these interaction patterns, you can build a behavioral profile that helps to distinguish between legitimate users and bots. Advanced tracking tools can record these interactions in real-time, providing a wealth of data that can be used to identify suspicious behavior as it occurs.

Cloudflare to the Rescue

Dealing with bot traffic on your website can be a daunting task. Bots can cause a range of problems, from slowing down your site to inflating your analytics with fake traffic, or even consuming resources meant for real users. Cloudflare is a service that can help you manage and reduce this bot traffic effectively, without requiring you to have in-depth technical knowledge. The of it all Cloudflare offers a robust free pricing package.

Simplified Bot Protection – Cloudflare offers a range of tools designed to automatically identify and block malicious bots before they can cause harm to your website. When you set up Cloudflare, your website’s traffic passes through Cloudflare’s network, where it is analyzed in real-time. Cloudflare uses advanced algorithms to distinguish between real users and bots. This means that much of the bot traffic is filtered out before it even reaches your website, allowing your server to focus on genuine visitors.

Easy-to-Use Security Features – One of the biggest advantages of Cloudflare is how easy it is to use. You don’t need to be a security expert to set up basic protections. Cloudflare’s dashboard provides you with simple controls where you can enable features like CAPTCHAs (those challenges that ask users to prove they’re human), rate limiting (which restricts how many requests a user can make in a short period), and automatic bot detection. These features help ensure that bots are blocked or slowed down, while real users can access your site smoothly.

Automated Rate Limiting – Bots often work by sending a large number of requests to your site in a very short time, trying to overwhelm your server. Cloudflare helps prevent this with automated rate limiting. This feature restricts how many requests a single visitor can make in a given time period. If a bot tries to flood your site with requests, Cloudflare will automatically slow it down or block it entirely, keeping your website running smoothly for legitimate users.

Protecting Your Resources – By reducing bot traffic, Cloudflare helps you conserve your website’s resources, such as bandwidth and server capacity. Bots can consume a lot of these resources, which could otherwise be used to serve your real visitors. With Cloudflare filtering out unwanted traffic, your website can handle more legitimate users without requiring additional infrastructure or costing you extra money for bandwidth.

Continuous Monitoring and Updates – Cloudflare also continuously monitors for new types of bot attacks and updates its defenses automatically. This means you don’t have to worry about keeping up with the latest threats-Cloudflare does it for you. Their system adapts to new bot tactics, ensuring that your website remains protected even as the online environment changes.

User-Friendly Setup – Setting up Cloudflare on your website is straightforward. Once you sign up and point your domain to Cloudflare’s servers, you can start using its security features right away. The interface is designed to be intuitive, so you can easily enable and adjust settings that control how bot traffic is managed. Cloudflare takes care of the complex security tasks, allowing you to focus on creating content and managing your website.

Heavy Lift for Free – Cloudflare’s free plan provides a solid foundation of security, performance, and reliability features for website owners, making it an excellent choice for those looking to protect and optimize their sites without incurring costs.

Fighting back against malicious bots is an unfortunate reality on the internet. You probably won’t ever get to a point of keeping 100% of bad bot traffic from landing on your server, but you can use tools and tactics like those discussed above to make good progress on this matter. With a bit of effort and some fine-tuning as you gain experience in this area, you can clean up the traffic to your site and keep things far more secure.