Are you running a WordPress blog and suffering from resource draining and content theft?
If so here are two things you can implement that will show the abusers the door.
These days there are a multitude of resource hogs that will eat up your websites hosting resources really fast. If you are social sharing your blog articles the risk of getting your website shut down (especially if on shared hosting) is high.
The net is like the old wild wild west days with little to no regulation. While some US laws may add some copyright protection, US law does not apply to other countries. Bad bots are at an all time high, and the threat is increasing monthly. Tweet or Google+ share an article and bam.. They come rushing over to index and possibly harvest your post. This is a serious problem with no end in sight.
You can apply deny bot rules in .htaccess that will show a bunch of them the door. Here is the text of my .htaccess file. Just copy and paste.
Backup your existing .htaccess file before attempting this modification as your site WILL CRASH if this is not implemented properly.
# Begin Bad Bot Blocking BrowserMatchNoCase Baiduspider bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase yeti bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase yandex bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase yandeximages bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Spinn3r bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase sosospider+ bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase sogou bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Sogouwebspider bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase nutch bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase toscrawler bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase mj12bot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase rogerbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase magpie-crawler bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase sistrix bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ezooms bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase blekkobot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase zh-cn bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ejeniobot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase seokicks-robot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase compspybot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase sistrix bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase garlikcrawler bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase grapeshotcrawler bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase careerbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ezooms bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase special_archiver bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase acoonbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase aboundex bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase wotbox bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase proximic bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase discoverybot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase yisouspider bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase zumbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase turnitinbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase python-requests bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase exabot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase jetslide bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ccbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase SemrushBot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase larbin_2.6.3 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase mandalay bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase urlappendbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase curl bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase libcurl bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase wget bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase archive.org_bot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase semantifire1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase pollbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase spbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Butterfly/1.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ia_archiver bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase heritrix bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase comodo-webinspector-crawler bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase www.integromedb.org bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase hrbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase 200pleasebot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ahrefsbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase botw bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase openhosebot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase paperlibot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase livelapbot bad_bot Order Deny,Allow Deny from env=bad_bot # End Bad Bot Blocking
Part two is to download and enable this WordPress plugin: Bad Behavior . Bad Behavior prevents spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place.
The easiest way to download this plugin is from your WordPress plugin menu add new plugin link. Just search for bad behavior and click install then activate. Once activated you will need to whitelist two specific ip ranges that are the Googlebot: 66.249.64.0/19 and Google structured data testing tool: 173.194.0.0/16. And lets not forget about the lonely Bingbot: 65.52.0.0/14 and Bing Imagebot: 199.30.16.0/20.
Next thing is to get an access key from Project Honey Pot that allows access to their dirty IP blacklist. And if your running behind CloudFlare it’s best to check the box Reverse Proxy / Load Balancer and enter this user agent: Cf-Connecting-Ip.
This will greatly improve your site loading speed. And if your not using CloudFlare i suggest implementing that solution as well.
Any questions comment below 😉
FidoSysop
I'm a former Auto Dealer and Mechanic born in the 50s. In 1991 Doc's Place Bulletin Board System was born on the Fidonet Network. Since the net went public I've been studying and mastering it becoming a tech-savvy hobbyist webmaster. I.blog my opinion about many worthy subjects and maintain a large conservative archive!
