Bots are integral to a broad spectrum of digital marketing and SEO. Bot traffic is among the most critical factors in SEO in 2024 since Google uses web crawlers or bots to index and identify new content.
Bots crawl the web page when discovering new content pieces to determine the page type. Web Pages are ranked well in search engines when the content is often crawled. Google decides on ranking or not ranking a content piece through its key indicators, the bot traffic.
Crunchy Digital provides insight into the importance of bot traffic in SEO in 2024 through this guide below to help you understand the broad automation landscape.
Overview Of Bot Traffic
Bot traffic or bots are the traffic that automated scripts generate. The scripts or bots copy human beings to confuse people or distinguish genuine human traffic from these bots. Bot traffic is the non-human or bot visits to an application or a website. Approximately 40% of all web traffic constitutes bot traffic.
SEO on a site is improved when you use good bot traffic and minimise bad bot traffic. Bots are the ideal methods that assist search engines in knowing a site and its content, navigating it, and getting information about the site’s content. Indexing and crawling through bots provide better information to users in their search results.
Understanding Good Bots Vs. Bad Bots
- The Good Bots
The activities of good bots on a server or website are harmless. They transparently announce their functions and presence on the site. Search engine crawlers are among the most popular good bots that index and discover a site’s content and ensure that users get accurate results from search engines.
Some widespread good bots include commercial bots, SEO crawlers, social media bots, aggregator/feed bots, and site-monitoring bots.
- The Bad Bots
Bad bots function for malicious activities and usually flood websites with intrusive advertisements, irrelevant backlinks, and meaningless comments. These bots may commit fraudulent activities, including preserving premium seats and events or concerts, stealing spots, and other spam acts.
Some bad bot varieties that perform malicious activities include comment spam bots, email scrapers, brute force or credential stuffing bots, and scraper bots. A few strategies to minimise bad bot traffic to the site include restricting their website accessibility using CloudFlare and other available plugins to block the IP addresses or protect specific pages using passwords.
Using honeypot and Captcha can trap bots and make them reveal themselves to help you block them, while the security plugin blocks access of bad bot traffic to the site.
Understanding The Automaton Landscape- Bot Traffic In SEO In 2024
- Sitemaps Usage
Sitemaps are crucial for visibility and ranking in search engine results and SEO. Good bots can easily index the website when it has a site map that lists every web page. Some available plugins to generate sitemaps are XML Sitemaps or Yoast SEO. You must submit the sitemaps to Google Search Console.
- Accessibility To Bots
Automated software or bots are the ideal ways to help search engines discover content. You must ensure the website has an organised code and a simple and clean design. It guarantees that the bots have accessibility to the site. Careful use of the robot.txt script will tell bots what they could index and what not.
- Content Consistency
Bots can easily index and discover your site through its content. Content consistency is the primary way to assist bots in improving the site’s SEO and keeping it up-to-date and crawled. Blogging is among the best ways to maintain content consistency on your site. It will attract new visitors to the site and share fresh content with viewers.
- Structured Data
A code schema markup, structured data, makes search engines learn about the site’s content. Although structuring data is challenging, you may set up and add it to the site using the Structured Data Markup Helper of Google.
Conclusion
Bots are software applications or scripts that automate specific tasks online. Their proficiency can replace human actions since they perfectly mimic human behaviour. A website can have a positive or negative impact through bot traffic. The right approach can help you use bot traffic to minimise the bad bot traffic impact on your site and improve your SEO.
An ideal balance between good and bad bots is crucial to let the good bots continuously crawl and index the site. It would help if you optimised communicative measures and defensive measures to mitigate the impact of bad bots and let good bots strengthen the digital presence of a business or website.
Crunchy Digital, the digital marketing experts, can help you strengthen the site’s security through the strategic approach to let your website get crawled through good bots and minimise bad bots’ traffic.
