solved How to Stop "Bad Bot Spam"

Last Friday one of our new sites on Jamroom Hosting jumped from an average of 30 new daily users to over 100. Come to find out they are all coming from Amazon in Boardman OR. After researching, the consensus is that these are "Bad Bots" that ignore the robot.txt.

What can we do to stop them and save the server load?

Additionally, they are bouncing on every page and now we are over 95% on our bounce rate. The same day this started our search impressions dropped from over 400 to 200, and our page 1 impressions dropped from 59 pages to 3. Previous to last Friday we were in a steady growth of Google Search page impressions, now we are in a steady decline. Unfortunately, the bad bot hits keep increasing. It is a mess!

Any thoughts?


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The Patria Company - patriaco.com / quality-trades.com / a-t.life - doing Jamroom since v3
updated by @the-patria-company: 11/03/18 12:10:11PM

These aren't bots - these are users using Amazon EC2 instances out of Amazon's AWS west data center as VPN servers so they can appear to come from the US. You need to make sure that when a spam account signs up on your site, any content they post is immediately removed, otherwise you're going to have problems.

Make sure you are using the Spam Blocker module with User probation enabled - this will help you out, since your Google SERP's can be hit if Google feels you're not proactive with removing spam from your site.

There's no fool proof automatic way to handle all this - it takes a real person watching for spam and removing it immediately, since you're combating real people on the other side trying to post the spam. Spammers have not been using bots for years now - it's all real people employed in places like India and China where they are paid based on the number of sites they can get pre-made messages posted to. Many of these companies use Amazon AWS for VPN's or mechanical turk.

Also - these users are not placing much of a load on your server - your server has not exceeded 22% load in the last 3 days, so you're good there.

Let me know if that helps.


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net