Bad Bot Blocker

The Bad Bot Blocker in All in One SEO blocks known bad robots and crawlers from accessing your site. 

These bad bots can overload a site and cause performance problems or even take your site down. In addition, they can pass information and content from your site to bad actors looking to exploit this information.

This guide will help you use the Bad Bot Blocker to safeguard your site and content.

To get started, click on Tools in the All in One SEO menu and then click on the Bad Bot Blocker tab.

Tools menu item in the All in One SEO menu

You should see the Bad Bot Blocker settings.

Bad Bot Blocker settings in All in One SEO

The first setting is the Block Bad Bots using HTTP toggle. Enable this to block bad bots and crawlers from your site.

The next setting is the Block Referral Spam using HTTP toggle. Enable this to block referral spam from your site. Referral spam is a unique type of spam that appears in your Google Analytics as fake traffic.

Next, you can use the Use Custom Blocklists toggle to display the User Agent Blocklist and Referer Blocklist fields. These show which bots and referrers All in One SEO is blocking.

You can edit these lists by placing your cursor anywhere within the User Agent Blocklist and Referer Blocklist fields and typing the name of a bot or referrer you want to block.

Use Custom Blocklist toggle displays the Blocklist fields

The final setting is the Track Blocked Bots toggle. Enable this to record all blocked traffic to a log file on your server. This is useful if you want to see who’s being blocked. There’s a link you can click on to view the log.

Track Blocked Bots toggle

Bad Bot Blocker module in All in One SEO

The Bad Bot Blocker will block known bad robots and crawlers from accessing your site. These bad bots can overload a site and cause performance problems or even take your site down. In addition, they can pass information and content from your site to bad actors looking to exploit this information.

This guide will help you use the Bad Bot Blocker to safeguard your site and content.

Block Bad Bots using HTTP

This is the basic setting that will block bad bots and crawlers from your site.

Block Referral Spam using HTTP

This setting will block referrer spam from your site. Referrer spam is a unique type of spam that appears in your Google Analytics as fake traffic.

Track Blocked Bots

This will log all blocked traffic and display the log at the bottom of the screen where it says Log of Blocked Bots. This is useful if you want to see who's being blocked.

Use Custom Blocklists

Enable this setting to display the User Agent Blocklist and Referrer Blocklist where you can see what bots we block. You can edit these lists by placing your cursor anywhere within the User Agent Blocklist and Referrer Blocklist fields and typing the name of a bot you want to block.

Log of Blocked Bots

A log of blocked bots will appear here if you've enabled the Track Blocked Bots setting.