The bots have been all over me lately. I got over 112,000 visits yesterday, and I currently have over 100,000 visits today, not even halfway through the day (as you'll recall, this blog's statistical day goes from 9 a.m. to 9 a.m.). This situation reminds me of the thousands of flies that covered our family dog in the backyard the day before he died. Sad and creepy all at once. The way he stared at me was haunting. But definitely a sign of impending death. Searching for "how to stop bot traffic to your blog" brings up many possible solutions. I might have to implement some of them if I don't want to be a corpse.
Even if that means far more modest stats.
A search for "why are some blogs more prone to getting bots than others" gets me this:
Some blogs are more prone to bot traffic than others due to factors like high search engine visibility, outdated security, popular niches, or the presence of interactive elements that can be exploited, such as comment sections. As of 2026, the surge in AI training, which involves intense data scraping, has also made blogs with high-quality, easily accessible content prime targets.
You could probably password protect the blog, but that would obviously discourage new readers. I am guessing that there may be some way to include a password on the banner page to foil (some) of the bots.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the home page could have something like, "This blog is password protected. The password is 'banana'. Please type that into the password box below to access." Don't think that bots are smart enough yet to read the banner, and then type in a password. And legitimate new readers would have instant access.
Brian
"the surge in AI training, which involves intense data scraping, has also made blogs with high-quality, easily accessible content prime targets."
ReplyDeleteYou should be honored! And that's why I don't have this problem on my worthless blog.
Seriously though, are there any other adverse impacts other than visitor number distortions?
You'd have made a good spin doctor. Always finding the chunks of corn in the piles of shit. The AI god's answer to your question is:
DeleteBot traffic distorts analytics, inflates bounce rates, and consumes bandwidth, which can slow down your blog and potentially trigger ad network penalties if invalid clicks occur.
Unwanted bot traffic impacts a Blogspot (Blogger) blog in several key ways:
1. Distorted Analytics
- Skewed Metrics: Bots artificially inflate your pageview counts, making it impossible to understand your actual audience size or which posts resonate with real humans.
- Lower Engagement Rates: Bots bounce instantly or click few links, significantly lowering your average session duration, pages-per-session, and increasing your bounce rate.
- Data-Driven Misdirection: If you rely on your blog data to make decisions about future content, you will be optimizing for automated scripts rather than real readers.
2. Ad Revenue and Account Risks
- Ad Account Suspension: If malicious bots repeatedly click on your Google AdSense or affiliate links, ad networks may flag your account for "invalid traffic" or click fraud, which can lead to permanent account bans and withheld earnings.
- Incorrect RPM Metrics: Bots do not buy products or engage with ads properly. This drops your conversion rates and earnings per thousand impressions (RPM).
3. SEO and Content Scraping
- Content Theft: Scraper bots automatically copy your articles, images, and posts, republishing them elsewhere. This can cause duplicate content issues where a scraped site outranks your original Blogspot blog on search engines.
- Wasted Crawl Budget: Search engine crawlers have a limit on how many pages they index. If bots are constantly pinging your site, search engines might not efficiently crawl and index your newest, high-quality posts.
4. Site Performance
- Slower Load Times: A high volume of simultaneous bot requests overloads your server's bandwidth. While Blogger runs on Google's massive infrastructure, massive bot spikes can still result in sluggish page loading for legitimate visitors, which negatively affects your Core Web Vitals and search rankings.
How to Mitigate Bot Traffic on Blogspot
Since you cannot install custom server-side bot-filtering plugins on Blogger, you rely on built-in options and third-party tools:
- Enable Custom Robots.txt: Use Blogger’s native settings to prevent bad bots from indexing specific pages and folders. Ensure you only allow beneficial bots (like Googlebot) to crawl your site.
- Add a Third-Party Firewall: Route your domain through a free CDN and security service like Cloudflare to automatically filter out malicious bot requests before they ever reach your blog.
- Monitor Your Stats: Look for traffic spikes from unusual geographic regions, suspiciously high direct traffic percentages, or traffic with 0-second durations in your Blogger Stats or Google Analytics.
Turns out I can't use Cloudflare with a regular Blogspot URL: I'd have to move my site to a unique URL. I'll find a solution and reduce my traffic to something sane. Then again, at certain times of the month, almost every month, traffic dips to close to 2000/day of its own accord. Almost as though the bots were sleeping.