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Info title Loading pages by bots IMPORTANT- A bot will not always load a web page in the same way a browser will load and execute the page. In most cases, so bots can more quickly scan an entire site, they will not execute the JavaScript on a web page, which in the case of Google Analytics, will not fire off the statistical information to capture this event in the Google Analytics portal.
Good Bots
There are many kinds of good bots, each designed for different tasks.
Here are some examples:
- Search engine bots: Also known as web crawlers or spiders. These bots "crawl," or review, content on almost every website on the Internet, and then index that content so that it can show up in search engine results for relevant user searches. They are operated by search engines like Google, Bing, or Yandex.
- Copyright bots: These bots crawl platforms or websites looking for content that may violate copyright law. They can be operated by any person or company that owns copyrighted material. Copyright bots can look for duplicated text, music, images, or even videos.
- Site monitoring bots: These bots monitor website metrics, e.g., monitoring for backlinks or system outages, and can alert users of major changes or downtime. For instance, Cloudflare operates a crawler bot called Always Online that tells the Cloudflare network to serve a cached version of a webpage if the origin server is down.
- Commercial bots: These bots are operated by commercial companies that crawl the Internet for information. They may be operated by market research companies monitoring news reports or customer reviews, ad networks optimizing the places where they display ads or SEO agencies that crawl clients' websites.
- Feed bots: These bots crawl the Internet looking for newsworthy content to add to a platform's news feed. Content aggregator sites or social media networks may operate these bots.
- Chatbots: These bots imitate human conversation by answering users with preprogrammed responses. Some chatbots are complex enough to carry on lengthy conversations.
- Personal assistant bots: Examples; Siri or Alexa. Although these programs are much more advanced than the typical bot, they are bots nonetheless since they arecomputer programs that browse the web for data.
Info title Good bots Without good bots, your website will not be indexed meaning that SEO will be impacted, and searching for products in an internet search will not work. If you want your website to rank highly on Google or any search engine, you need to ensure that web crawlers can always reach and read your content.
Bad Bots
- Here are some examples:
A website scraper bot: These bots will generally send a series of HTTP GET requests and then copy and save all the information that the web server sends in reply, making its way through the hierarchy of a website until it's copied all the content. More sophisticated scraper bots can use JavaScript to, for instance, fill out every form on a website and download any gated content. "Browser automation" programs and APIs allow automated bot interaction with websites and APIs as if they were using a traditional web browser in an attempt to trick the website’s server into thinking a human user is accessing the content. An individual could manually copy and paste an entire website instead, but bots can crawl and download all the content on a website often in a matter of seconds, even for large sites like e-commerce sites with hundreds or thousands of individual product pages.
Price scraping This is when one company downloads all the pricing information from a competitor company's website so that they can adjust their own pricing accordingly.
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SEO stands for search engine optimisation. This is the discipline of readying content for search indexing so that a website shows up higher in search engine results. If search engine bots do not crawl a website, then it cannot be indexed, and it won't show up in search results. For this reason, if a website owner wants to get organic traffic from search results, they mustn't block web crawler bots.
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