Stop the Spam! A Tale of Spam Bots

While going through Google Analytics, my heart skipped a beat as I noticed rankings and page views have skyrocketed in the past month or so.

I mean, after preaching about Google’s notorious length of time proving authority, surely this kind of increase would be something to showcase in six to nine months, right?

Perhaps Google has changed their algorithm and indexing…

Until I found them. Yes, them.

The dreaded spam bots.

Google Analytics showed it as “free-social-buttons.com” a handful of times. I also had “guard link.org” amongst others.

These are black-hat (meaning, very bad) methods of trying to game the Google SEO algorithm which could lead to suspension or outright Google search expulsion.

It also greatly skewed the analytics I have to determine my audience and what you guys are interested in (and what you frankly don’t care about).

So, as you can tell, it was impertinent to have these bots stopped.

Just say no to spam(bots).

After all, they’re bouncing off servers and perhaps causing loading problems, looking for security holes within the system (like WordPress), and creating a incredibly high bounce rate (not a good thing for SEO).

In the short run, spam bots can help increase ranking a small amount but in the long run, it could be cause a lot of SEO problems down the road.

How Do We Stop Spam Bots?

Spam bots can be stopped a number of ways depending on your expertise of SEO and servers.

The easiest and quickest way is through a WordPress plug-in (if you’re a WordPress fan) called WP Ban.

With this plug-in, you can ban IP addresses, referral URL, host name, among other methods in which will give the spammers a firewall block to your website. Though this isn’t foolproof, it will prove a drastic decrease on the amount of spammers pinging your servers and website.

Of course, there are tons of other methods to block these spammers for the tech-savvy.

This doesn’t take very long especially if you have a handful of spammy websites coming in. Download and activate the plug-in and add the spammers to your list before saving. You’ll even receive a list of the amount of pings were blocked from these addresses, which is pretty awesome to see your work.

Now It’s Your Turn

If you’ve been having spam problems or have implemented a method to block spammers, let us know how it’s going. Also, if you’re using another method to blocking spam bots, let us know below your method and accuracy.

We look forward to your comments below.

Thanks for reading!