There are good bots and bad bots. On the one hand, good bots help improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings while on the other hand, bad bots can have marketing teams camped out with the IT and security teams trying to figure out what to do. For organizations that provide online services, not only do bad bots negatively impact SEO rankings, but they can also wreak havoc on productivity, brand image, and ultimately a company’s bottom line.
In speaking with many of our customers about identity-related threats and bot detection, security now needs to work across a variety of internal stakeholders in order to protect their online applications and the customer journey. How threats impact SEO and their company’s marketing and product teams are becoming an increasingly critical problem that security teams need to help address.
According to a recent research report, we live in a world where bad bots represent a quarter of all internet traffic. Even though bots are nondiscriminating, there are some industries that tend to be targeted more frequently. These same researchers found financial, education, IT & services industries, marketplaces, and government are some of the most frequently targeted.
Bad bots are designed to launch automated attacks to steal your content, serve spam, take over accounts, and engage in other automated activities. All of which can impact an organization’s SEO.
Here are 4 ways that bots can interfere with SEO
The challenge with today’s bots is that they simulate basic human-like interactions. These bad bots are interacting with your website and applications much the same way a human user would. Examples of this are mimicking human mouse movements and keystrokes to try to get past your organization's detection tools, thus making them harder to detect and prevent.
Even more, these bad bots are able to figure out how to breach a user’s session by mimicking how a user behaves throughout their entire session. They can impact your website and application both before and after login. These bots can also mimic human behavior on both web and mobile which means that no channel of your digital business is safe. The best way to combat competitors from web scraping and block bad bots is by understanding a customer’s identity and using user behavior analytics (UBA) to spot these kinds of attacks.
In our recent post on “Redefining Bot Detection: Why Identity Matters,” we discuss how combining traditional bot detection signals with identity-aware detection offers much richer behavioral analytics that detects and stops automated attacks such as fake account creation, in-app scraping, content spam, credit card stuffing, and account takeover.. The better an organization is at stopping bots, the easier it will be to maintain and improve SEO.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Castle can protect your organization from sophisticated bot attacks as well as see a live demonstration of how a bot can compromise your customer application, watch our on-demand webinar on Beating Bad Bots.