The Real Risk Bad Bots Pose to Your Business
Understanding the risks posed by bots and how to mitigate them is essential for any business that provides services or handles customer information online. That’s because bots are a part of doing business on the internet, and many of them not only pose no risk but are in fact beneficial to your company’s services, such as the crawler bots that index your page for search engine rankings, or that help you track customer activity for marketing purposes.
The fact that these useful bots exist and need to be accommodated for your internet business model to function properly is what makes the bad bots all the more important to guard against, though. Since blocking all bots is not a possibility, it is important to have IT services that are up to date, with the expertise and equipment needed to block bad bots.
Advanced Persistent Bots
These are the class of bot that is most likely to wreak havoc on the internet. These bots impersonate humans, allowing hackers to exploit systems and distorting your marketing data at the same time. They are responsible for a fair proportion of the traffic on smaller and less protected sites, and they basically seek out weaknesses or opportunities to exploit the sites or to glean user information from their viewers. This is sometimes done through the posting of spam links to generate traffic to a target site. At other times, it is through hacking the weaker sites.
False Traffic’s Effect on Marketing Tools
Since your marketing data’s integrity is the key to its usefulness, all this false traffic renders your internal analytics worthless until it is accounted for. Finding a service that can help you block bad bots on your site can help, but since bots are an ever-evolving problem online, it is important to make sure that whatever service you do work with is committed to continuous improvement. That way, you can count on their service and their protection as you move forward.
Until your company can find a way to shut down the effect that bad bots have on your marketing data, it is important to know that they are also there, probing for opportunities to use your site. That means making sure that your comments sections require logins, using Captchas and other verification tools, and actively seeking a more permanent solution to the bad bot problem. That way, you will have a plan to keep your site improving until your protection is as complete as it can be.
