Bots are actually programs meant to automate repetitive and various other tasks, both harmful and useful. That’s the reason why these are described as good bots and bad bots.

According to various research studies, more than 50% of traffic on the internet is made of bots. However, the malicious or bad bots must be mitigated quickly, otherwise, these can harm you.

However, when it comes to ensuring protection against bad bots, commonly people don’t know the difference between these. So, here we will let you know good bots vs. bad bots and how you can protect against them effectively.

So, here we go:

Good bots vs. bad bots: What’s the difference?

Let’s have a look at details of both categories of bots below to know more about these:

Good Bots

Good bots are commonly created to perform useful and helpful tasks of automation for your website visitors and company. Commonly, these bots aren’t designed with any bad intentions or to harm anyone. Good bots are created by well-reputed developers. Even more, this type of bot always respects the rules and regulations of the webmaster regarding how often these bots should crawl to index a site. robots.txt file commonly includes the rules that good bots have to follow.

However, examples of good bots include:

• Personal assistance bots
• Chatbots
• Site monitoring bots
• Copyright bots
• Search engine bots
• Commercial bots

Bad Bots

Bad bots are commonly created to perform malicious tasks. These bots work in evasive manners and are commonly used by cybercriminals, nefarious parties, and fraudsters. In short, anyone involved in criminal activity may use bad bots.

These bots can also be sent by your competitors or third-party scrapers to steal your site information and content. Such bots can read your site pages instantly and choke the available bandwidth by straining web servers. This will ultimately slow down your site for your actual users. These bots can also scrape your content to post that anywhere else.

In short, bad bots are dangerous for your site and you have to ensure protection against these bots as much as possible.

Examples of common bad bots’ attacks include:

• Account takeover
• Click fraud
• Spamming
• Credential stuffing
• Web scrapping, etc.

Best ways to protect against bad bots

Let’s have a look at some of the best ways for ensured protection against bad bots:

1. The basic rule to protect against bad bots is to block all the known sources in this regard.
2. Also, monitor your site traffic sources very carefully. If you find sudden change in metrics such as quick spikes or decrease in any metrics, take appropriate actions quickly.
3. Also, ensure to protect your open APIs and mobile applications. Even more, you should also share your blocking information across systems wherever it is possible.
4. Bots can make it hard to make data-driven decisions because you will feel that your site is growing consistently. The key to avoiding this is to block known bad bots from your site through Google analytics settings.
5. Additionally, you should use services such as captcha, MFA, and WAF to mitigate familiar bad bots. Even more, having a bot protection solution in place can help you too.

Overall, using these key strategies can easily let you have better protection against bad bots.  

Protectumus defends web, desktop and mobile applications against bad bots. With the Protectumus firewall your online business is protected against bad SEO bots, bad bots that slow your applications and servers.