Scraping is a very useful and proven technique to collect data or information from websites and syndicate it elsewhere. Technically, scraping is taken in as an illegal activity carried out without taking the say-so of the owner of the actual source. There are two types of scraping i.e. manual and robotic. In general, manual scraping is a laborious process and that is why programmers typically deploy high-tech programs known as bots and scrape a vast range of pages illegitimately.
So it is significant to ensure whether your website is safe from malicious bots. Let us take a look at how you can detect the presence of scraper bots on your website.
Content Duplication
Copying content from a website and syndicating the information on another website, without appropriate credit is against the law. By scraping your website, scrapers get an unjust benefit over your content. Scrapers pinch your content, tweak it and syndicate it elsewhere as if it is their own, in a couple of minutes. This will take a toll on your affordable traffic as well as your SEO Rankings. The internet is full of several scraper bots such as Copyscape or Plagiarism checker to keep a watch on content duplication, it will entail plenty of manual effort to detect this.
Crawling speed
Bots are automated programs that are fundamentally designed to carry out recurring tasks at a high rate, which is virtually impossible for humans to be achieved. Keeping a tab on the bot behavior can make uneven numbers (spikes) in metrics, for example, page duration, page visits, etc. Bots typically scrape lots of pages in a short period. So if anytime you feel there are visits in seconds, then you can make sure that they are bots.
Unwanted spamming
Bots are most likely to spam your website with superfluous messages by dint of the various forms on your website. As a businessperson who largely uses comment and registration forms, then this might be one extra concern for you. Bots search for the pages to get information and replete them with uncalled-for messages or malevolent links. This will seize control of the thread by acting as a hindrance between genuine user interactions and even upset the user.
The indications said above ensures the scraper bot activity on your website. However, most of the scraper bot programs are more developed and smart enough to copy genuine human behavior and it is hard to identify their presence in the lack of an automated anti-bot solution. In most of these cases, the scrapers will do away with the website even before they are identified. So it becomes essential to learn, how to identify scraper bots and the best way to put a hem on them.
For more information on scraper bot programs, please visit www.botscraper.com now.