There are many bad bots in Internet. Some of them scans your server ports some of them tries to inject malicious codes and cookies. And also there are many methods to block those unwanted bots. Everyone doesn’t have money to get a hardware based firewall to protect their servers,
Some companies claims that they have new way to block malicious traffic but they arent always reliable and accurate most recent example is this.
For wordpress there is a plugin called “Bad Behavior”.
Welcome to a whole new way of keeping your blog, forum, guestbook, wiki or content management system free of link spam. Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it.
Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
Bad Behavior also transcends other link spam solutions by working in a completely different, unique way. Instead of merely looking at the content of potential spam, Bad Behavior analyzes the delivery method as well as the software the spammer is using. In this way, Bad Behavior can stop spam attacks even when nobody has ever seen the particular spam before.
Bad Behavior is designed to work alongside existing spam prevention services to increase their effectiveness and efficiency. Whenever possible, you should run it in combination with a more traditional spam prevention service.
Seems interesting right? I mean simple solution like installing plugin to filter bad traffic? Yes I thought that too and went ahead installed it and ran it for about a month.
But I didnt bothered to check the log recently. And I did today and found out that its blocking some legitimate bots like Amazon,MSN (Bing) bots.
Thats bad,
So as the log it blocked MSN bot for about 1000 times. And I checked the wordpress forum about bad behavior plugin and found that some users complained that its blocking google bot too.
So think twice if you want to use this plugin!
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Same thing… Bad behavior blocks googlebot for my blog. Traffic from google fall down more than 5 times in two weeks.
Thanks for the info, never using this again! I just tried and then I found out that my views were dropping, but spam was gone though XD
Actually Pretty much everything blocked by BB was legit bots (even on softer settings).
I disabled it and left only akismet deal with spam.
When traffic and spam gets more intensive I’ll look into something like Spam Free Wordpress … or anything which may work like BB … without the blocking of legit bots and valid visitors. I’d appreciate suggestions actually.
I was using the WP BB plugin to help block spam until I noticed the exact same thing. I had been wondering why I wasn’t doing so well on Bing and then I found out, Bing couldn’t even crawl my site!
I’m now using Cloudflare which helps with the spam and speeds it up at the same time. Plus I’m now doing OK in Bing so it’s all good.
Also if I remember correctly I turned off the bad behavior plugin because it added a lot of extra javascript code to the wordpress pages. You probably know there is already a large amount of JS code in your average WP page and this was just too much. Seems like they should know the IP ranges for the most common search engines like Bing and Google.
Its really sucks, It also blocks by Google Bot too…
Is cloudflare really reliable.
Thanks
hi Ruchira, could you recomend another plugin to filter bad traffic? Thanks in advance!
Sam: thanks for Cloudflare!
what kind of bad traffic?
I lost 90% of my Google index since I used Bad Behavior plugin on my blog.It blocked googlebot for my blog (saw 945 errors in webmaster tools account).Now i’m still trying to solve the problem.
Solution is simple get rid of the plugin. Its rubbish.
When I visit the site, appears: warning: output started at/home/content/***************/plugins/badbehaivour/backlist**********)
I cannot access my ownsite. I believe Bad Behaivour is preventing me from login to it. So, can I just delete the plugin from root at my hosting?
Help please,
Alberto
Very strange: I use Bad Behaviour for years and 80% of my traffic (about 300 visitors each day) comes from Google search and my posts are well indexed.
About the problem and it’s correction.
if I don’t forget properly I put off the bad behavior plug-in due to the fact it added many additional javascript code to the wordpress webpages. You most likely know there is certainly a huge amount of JS code in your regular WP page and this was just excessive.