Website Marketing for Attorneys: How to Prevent Bots From Crawling Your Website

Generally speaking, you want your website content to be as “crawlable” as possible. It’s important that spiders – such as those from Google – be able to view your site quickly and easily. However, there might be times when you want to block bots. Keep reading to learn why you would want to block some bots and how to do so to improve overall law firm SEO.

Website Marketing for Attorneys

What is a Bot? 

Many people aren’t really sure what a bot is, which makes them difficult to prevent. Short for “robot”, a bot is a software application that’s designed to repeat a particular task over and over. SEO professionals can utilize bots to scale their SEO campaigns by automating as many tasks as possible. They can help digital teams work smarter instead of harder, for example scraping useful data from search engines. 

Are Bots and Spiders Harmless? 

For the most part, both spiders and bots are harmless. You actually need them in many cases. For example, you need Google’s bots to crawl and index your site in order to appear in search. Occasionally, though, bots can pose problems and provide unwanted traffic. This matters because: 

• They can cause confusion as to where your traffic is coming from. 
• They can muddle reports and make them hard to understand (and less useful). 
• You may encounter misattribution in Google Analytics. 
• Bandwidth can be increased to accommodate additional traffic, which can add to your costs. 
• Unwanted traffic can lead to other small nuisances that take up resources to deal with. 

Essentially, there are good bots and bad bots. The bots you want are running in the background and not attacking another user or website. Bad bots, on the other hand, break the security behind a website and can be used as a large-scale botnet to serve DDOS attacks against certain organizations. In these cases, a botnet can do what a single machine could not. 

By preventing certain bots from visiting your site, you can protect your data and see other benefits, such as: 

• Securing sensitive client data and other information from forms  
• Preventing software from taking advantage of security vulnerabilities to add bad links on your site
• Limiting bandwidth costs by preventing an influx of traffic you don’t want

How to Prevent Bad Bots from Crawling Your Site

Fortunately, there are things you can do to decrease the chances of the negative bots getting into your website. It’s not easy to discover every bot that can crawl your site, but you can usually find malicious ones that you wouldn’t want visiting. 

One method is through robots.txt. This is a file that is on the foundation of your web server. Sometimes it is there by default, but usually, it needs to be created. Here are some files you might find useful. 

1. To disallow Googlebot from your server 

Note: don’t use this one lightly. It should be reserved for situations where you want to block Googlebot from crawling your server entirely, such as when preventing access to your staging site.

• User-agent: Googlebot
• Disallow:/

2. To disallow all bots from your server

To avoid bots altogether, use this code. You might use this when you want to keep your site private for a while before a broad launch. 

• User-agent: *
• Disallow: /

3. To keep bots from crawling a specific folder

You may want to keep bots from crawling a certain folder. To do so, use this code: 

• User-agent: *
• Disallow: /folder-name/ 

It’s important to avoid certain common mistakes. The top errors include using both disallow in robots.txt and noindex, not including the correct path, or not testing the robots.txt file. 

1. Use the Robots.txt File: This file allows you to control which bots can access your site. You may need to create it if it doesn’t already exist. You can specify which bots to block entirely or restrict access to specific areas of your website.
2. Implement Rate Limiting: Configure your server to limit the number of requests from a single IP address within a given timeframe. This can help mitigate the effects of malicious bots.
3. Use CAPTCHA: For forms and login pages, implementing CAPTCHA can prevent automated submissions from bots while allowing legitimate users access.
4. Monitor Traffic Patterns: Regularly review your website’s traffic in analytics tools to identify unusual spikes or suspicious behavior that may indicate bot activity. 

Takeaway: 

Blocking bots and spiders does require some extra steps, but it’s worth the time. Doing so keeps your site safer and ensures you don’t fall into certain traps. By controlling certain bots, you’re better able to automate your SEO processes and improve website marketing for attorneys. All of this will enable a much stronger site that will remain useful and optimized for years to come. If you’re not sure how much of an issue bots are for your site (or what to do about them), reach out to our web design team. We stay up to date on the latest front and back-end developments, so you don’t have to. Contact us today for a free consultation.