Are you concerned about bot traffic hitting your website? This article will provide you with a clear understanding of what constitutes invalid or bot traffic and offer helpful tips on how to prevent it from coming to your site. We'll cover common causes and share practical measures you can take to safeguard your site. By understanding these factors, you can better protect your website from unwanted traffic and ensure a more secure online presence.

Invalid or bot traffic can compromise the integrity and performance of your website. Several factors contribute to this issue, and it's important to understand what they are in order to be able to proactively protect your website.

One significant cause is the purchasing of expired domains or redirecting old sites to a new one, which can lead to an influx of unwanted spam traffic. Another common vulnerability is becoming an easy target for hacking. Bots often attempt to log in to CMS admin portals to gain unauthorized access to a site. To mitigate this risk, it is advisable to change your CMS login page URL from a common or default setting to something unique (e.g., www.website.com/myadminportal_12 instead of www.website.com/admin).

Additionally, SEO practices like link-building and content-sharing in comment sections, online listings, and other public forums can attract web crawlers. When these links are placed in easily accessible locations, it increases the likelihood of web crawlers hitting your site frequently. If these crawlers are unsophisticated or the links are on pages commonly targeted by bots, this can result in an increase of invalid traffic to your site.

You should contact your host for advice on how to prevent invalid / bot traffic from coming to your website. For added protection, publishers can access Cloudflare's DDos Protection via Ezoic under Settings > Cloudflare.