The popular web log (blog) system WordPress is an amazing system for setting up and managing a blog, but what we don’t like is the amount of negative web traffic it attracts.

What is Negative Traffic?

Negative traffic is traffic generated from non living things i.e. Crawlers, Bots and Spam.

Crawlers are bots that download your website’s content to be indexed or re-posted on another site. Friendly Crawlers come from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

RSS Feeds are not a bad thing, but bad crawlers use them to re-post your websites news/updates.

Bots come in many forms, but the most common Bots are Spam Bots, these Bots have one purpose “Post or Send spam.” Bots are computer programs designed to seek out websites with email addresses, open comments, contact forms and send you spam.

Protecting Yourself

There is no real easy way to protect yourself from bots, just try to prevent them.

Spam filters are the best solution for dealing with bots, but can produce false positives.

CAPTCHAs are annoying to people but sometimes help.

Closing comments and contact forms to only registered members may help a little.

The best thing is to edit the programming of WordPress itself so Bots can’t find what it’s looking for.

Example: WordPress is programed to add a tag to every web page to state that your blog is generated by WordPress. Remove this.

If that still doesn’t help, then change all the terminological on the web pages for contact forms and comments so that they no longer say “contact”, “email”, “comment”, etc.

Banning IP addresses from accessing your site from the server level not through WordPress. This could be many and vast, smart bots can mask there IP address or jump from one to another, but it works. The down side is that if you ban too many IP addresses or the wrong one, you can ban real people visiting your site.

Block Crawlers from the server level using a “robots.txt” file. This text file is a list or rules that tell crawlers what to do. Use this to allow/deny or restrict access to your site by crawlers.

Block referrals from the accessing the your site from the server level.

A Final Thought

No matter how much we try, the growing popularity of your website will ways attract spam. [Hire moderators]

 

 

 

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