Do bots have manners?

Do bots have manners? Yes and No. There are good bots and bad bots. It is the bad bots that may be an issue, if they don't mind their manners. The bad bots can enter your site and steal your bandwidth, traffic, email addresses, content, and possibly hijack a web page. But how do you address these issues?

With my article "Behind the Scenes with Bots Manners" you can get the details on how to save yourself a lot of frustration when you're trying to figure out what is happening to your traffic. It's may be a gradual trickle, then as your website becomes known, you 'll eventually get a major slowdown. Or, you may have the people that maintain your server give you a heads-up that your traffic is being stolen.

Please note: In some cases a bad bot is a subjective view. If you have limited bandwidth you do have to determine which bots can stay and which must go. Of course, the content scrapers, email harvesters and web page hijackers, are rather obvious bad bots that can steal your money. Learn from my article how you can help your server control the bots.


Behind the Scenes with Bots Manners
Do bots have manners? You may be saying to yourself, "I really don't care if bots have manners". But you should. Why? If they behave badly, you are the recipient of lost bandwidth, traffic, or content and email. But there are some ways in which you can keep search engine bots honest. How, you ask? It is the .htaccess file, the robots.txt file and the meta tag that can save your traffic, content and email from being stolen or abused. The first two, are simple text files, and the last, a line of code that direct all or specific bots that enter the web page, to follow your set rules. READ MORE...