Search Engine Optimization is vital for online marketing and other websites, but bots’ presence will affect your site’s ranking. Because SEO is critical, you can seek expert SEO services in the market.
In today’s article, you will learn about the effect of bots on SEO ranking.
SEO Bots and Bad Bots
The introduction of bots has had a significant interference on the SEO ranking both positively and negatively. There are good bots that positively impact your website’s SEO ranking, and bad bots will lower your search engine ranking. Currently, many websites are investing highly in web security. This is to prevent attacks from bad bots that will not only affect SEO ranking but lower your company’s production and image.
According to Imperva’s 2019 report, they found out that bad bots made almost a quarter of global web traffic. In 2020 a similar study by Imperva showed an increase in the lousy bot’s percentage on overall website traffic.
Ways that Bots Can Interfere with SEO
There are different ways bad bots can affect your SEO ranking. In this section, you will understand five methods of bots that will affect your website’s SEO.
1. Web and Price Scraping
One of the primary occurrences that many users complain about bots is web and price scraping. Web scraping entails stealing content from one website and posting it on another website without the website’s admin’s permission. When such happens, the post’s page ranking will go down, resulting in traffic reduction and thus less revenue from your site.
As for price scraping, such bots will collect your products and services price data and share it with your competitors. When your competitors get such information, they will reduce their prices to rank high on search engines that show low priced products and services. This will impact your ranking, conversion, and sales.
2. Form Spamming
Form spamming is another way bots can affect your search engine optimization ranking. What form spamming means is repeated website form submission, which is incorrect to change your site’s traffic database. By doing so, it will show you an increase in leads, which is not legitimate.
Additionally, such spams will inject backlinks and SQL that are a threat to your SERP ranking. This might result in your site being blacklisted and ultimately taken down from search engines.
3. Hacking
According to RapidBI, out of five visitors to your website, three are bots. With such reports, any website is always under threat of hacking. Hackers send bots mostly through comments, in the long run, gaining access to your website without your knowledge. They will place their spiteful link or code in any section of your site.
That way, they will have access to your site’s private information and even your visitor’s’ details such as email and location. When search engines such as Google notice such codes or links, they will warn visitors before accessing any content on your website.
This will lower your SERP ranking, but no user will be willing to visit your site due to the warning they receive from search engines.
4. Skewed Metrics and Analytics
As the admin, you will be checking your site’s metrics and analytics, such as traffic, from time to time. Organic traffic is vital as it determines the revenue you will get. Additionally, it translates to how your site is doing compared to your competitors. But that won’t be helpful anymore if high bots infiltrate your website. If this occurs, your site’s metrics and analytics will be erroneous.
Furthermore, this can cause inaccurate conversion rates making you change from effective SEO strategies to those that will not work, causing a low ranking on SERP.
5. Content Spamming
The last way bots will interfere with your site’s SEO is through content spamming. This phenomenon is noticed mainly in websites that allow sharing and posting of content without any moderation. Spam content will include poor quality backlinks, which might make search engines to ban your website. In worse scenarios, search engines will remove your site from being accessed by visitors.
Note: Form and content spamming are hard to notice and require lots of time for you to realize such issues. That’s why you need a web security website to check your website time and again. By doing so, you will prevent form or content spamming from happening.
Beating Bad Bots to Improve Website SEO
After learning how harmful a bot is to your website. Then you must be looking for ways to prevent bots from affecting your SEO. Therefore, in this segment, you will learn ways to put away bots and improve your website SEO.
Deleting Spam Comments
Before approving a visitor’s comment, content management systems give administrators an option to either delete or approve comments. For your information, not all comments are from genuine users. Others are from bots and can affect your website. Discovering the authenticity of a statement is a challenge, but you can by checking the following things.
- Is the visitor’s email address valid?
- Is the name of the users real, or are they using keyword?
- Does the comment have a link, and is it safe for my visitors?
By asking yourself such questions and getting answers, you will know if the comment is spammy.
Block Known Bad Bots
There are known bad bots, and there are ways of blocking them before they attack your website. For accessible knowledge of bad bots, you can input this on your search engine, “list of bad bots.”
Always Check your Website Ranking
Another crucial point you need to be continuously monitoring is your website ranking. This will show you how your site is performing. In case you notice a decline in SERP ranking, there might be an injection of bad bots, thus causing such.
Testing Website Speed
Website speed is vital for all users. When it’s slow, visitors will find it unfriendly and move to competitor websites, thus reducing traffic, conversion, and sales. When you notice this, you must check the speed of your website. If it’s slow, then bots might be looking for means to steal your website.
Conclusion
Bad bots are harmful to your website, and being cautious is the only way to prevent them from affecting your site’s SEO, thus lowering your SERP ranking. It would be best if you seek help from cybersecurity experts to notice such bots and remove them quickly without them causing enormous site problems.