5 in 1 website protection: from bots, parsers, SEO bots, clicking and vulnerability scanners

Today, search engines expect more than just relevant content and a quick server response from the site owner. What is important islegitimate traffic  - a flow of visits in which there are no massive “empty” visits, fake refusals and distorted behavioral signals - a site that is reliably protected.

But while bots, parsers, aggressive SEO bots, clicks and automatic scanners are visiting the site, analytics and search engines see a picture that does not reflect real users. The bounce rate is growing, behavioral factors are deteriorating, and SEO and advertising work produces a weak or negative effect - even with good content and investments in promotion.

Without protecting the site from these types of activities, growthorganic traffic hits the ceiling: the system evaluates not your site for people, but a mixture of people and automation. And some experts say that the system stops evaluating the site altogether, believing that the owner is trying to influence the search results, or, in principle, due to the inability to reliably understand the traffic of the concerned site. On the other hand, bursts of bot load overload the server: PHP, database, disk, sessions. Legitimate visitors in spades experience delays, timeouts and the feeling that “the site is constantly hanging,” although the problem is not with the hosting as such, but with the fact that resources are wasted on illegitimate or almost continuous traffic.

If the site is not growing, you cannot do without site protection. As soon as the site began to grow in search results, italmost immediately you will encounter numerous bots that will stop your growth.

Comprehensive protection covers both sides: pure analytics and SEO signals, plus stable operation of the site under load.

Below are five areas in one solution Talosion Defense (core and panel from the line of secure products).

1. Protecting your site from bots

Talozion screenshot with a log of bots being blocked according to various rules.

“Bots” mean a wide range of automated visitors: simple scripts, headless browsers, cheating services, spam registrations, form brute force, bulk requests to the catalog and API.

Talosion does not rely on one sign. Taken into account:

• frequency and activity limits - requests per second, minute, hour, day; if exceeded - temporary ban, verification (CAPTCHA / JS-challenge) or hard blocking;
• behavior on the page - “humanity” index, mouse movements, scrolling, delays (via JS tracker);
• analysis of subnets - if there is anomalous activity from one /24, the entire subnet is cut, and not just one IP;
• IP reputation, black and white lists, heuristics based on request signatures.

As a result, the bot either does not reach the heavy logic of the site, or passes the test as “suspicious” - without an endless load on the server.

2. Protection from parsers

Parsing the catalog, prices, descriptions and media is not a one-time visit, but a flow of thousands of requests. Even “smart” parsers with pauses run into long-term limits and bans.

Talosion's goal is to make data collection economicalmeaningless:

• fast parsers are cut off by limits and bans;
• slow - long limits (hour / day / week) and repeated checks;
• when trying to bypass - CAPTCHA and blocking, which automation without recognition services does not scale cheaply.

It is possible to parse a site, but expensive and slow  - it’s easier to look for another source. For a business owner, this is protection of assortment, prices and unique content.

3. Protection from SEO bots (and behavioral distortions)

Ya. Metrica screenshot and site bounce rate for the year with protection fromSeo-bots

enabled

A separate class are bots that imitate search transitions: they came in, left almost immediately, generated refusals and spoiled the picture in Metrica and for algorithms.

The logic at work here is similar to the tower “Invisible Guardian”: analytics scripts (Yandex.Metrica and other counters) are not loaded immediately for each visit. First, visitor activity is assessed- whether there are signs of a living user. Only after this the metric is connected.

Bots that “flickered” and left are not included in the reports as full-fledged visits with a refusal. Yandex and you see behavior closer to the real audience - lower refusals, cleaner behavioral factors, fewer false signals for demotion in search results.

This is not a replacement for SEO, but a condition in which SEO and content are evaluated by people, and not by the background automation of competitors and gray schemes.

4. Anti-click protection