I just bought a domain for my Blogger site. I noticed an unusual rise in my page views, and I tried to trace the source of the traffic but it's a dead end... This excessive bot traffic got my AdSense account banned.
What can I do to stop the bot?
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You could try to identify the bot in Google Analytics and then add it to your robots.txt file, but that's unlikely to help (see this as to why). That's really the only option you have with Blogger. Webcrawlers shouldn't result in AdSense getting banned on Blogger however, since Google operates both and is responsible for blocking unwanted bots there. I'd suggest filing an appeal with AdSense if you're certain that was the reason. – dan♦ Sep 24 '16 at 6:15
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That is very strange. Just earlier I was wondering if Google gives a smidgen more leeway on hosted Google Sites, since only they can control the robots.txt. That's crazy to think Google would penalize what they control, if in fact that is the case as mentioned. I'm curious to know the outcome. – norcal johnny Sep 24 '16 at 6:50
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I am curious when you say you are seeing pageviews, cant you in turn see ip addresses? If so, how is tracing it a dead end? That would be helpful info. – norcal johnny Sep 24 '16 at 7:39
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Why is finding the source of the traffic a dead end? If you know anything at all about it, please tell. Google may have some reason to assume you are somehow responsible for the traffic, promoting the ban. – Tim Grant Sep 24 '16 at 11:12
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I am not the former owner of the domain, The domain has already expired so when I bought its available .. Google Analytics can't trace it ...I use supercounters to trace my traffic too.but I can't find still find the source..This my super counters link supercounters.com/stats/1240316 Help me take a look at it – Rashotech Sep 24 '16 at 11:26
If you are unable to trace the traffic source then how can you say it is a bot ? I think, you have missed something. Go through analytics once again, I am sure you will find the culprit. If it is a bot then you need to note down its IP and block traffic from that particular IP addess. I hope this will solve the problem.
Stop search crawlers with robot.txt
Create a robot.txt file with it's Content to block search bots that crawls your content:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
Block bad bots with .htaccess
Use the IP list from https://ip-bannliste.de/aktuelle-bannliste.html for your .htaccess file to block spammers and bad bots.
Helpful resources:
Stop DDOS attacks
If you getting still high Traffic from bots, try to use a proxy (for Blogger: use a plugin) e.g. CloudFlare.
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If you are using free blogspot domain, you can enable the https if being prompted by Google. Go to the Settings tab and check redirect to HTTPS for more secure connection.
I suspect this is a referral bot, not a search engine bot. Check your traffic report in Analytics (if you have created one), if not, check the referral traffic source in the Stats section of the Blogger dashboard. The best thing to block this referral traffic is through .htaccess. This file is on your file server, if you have a business account, reach out to the technical support them if they can give you access to the .htaccess file. If you have free blogger account, you can't access it.
Try revisiting your comments section not to automatically approve comments (nested comments). I suspect there might be one or a few approved comments that contains the spam referral.
Appeal your banned account in Google Adsense once you have evidence to justify that your blog is a victim of referral spam.
P.S. robots.txt does not block referral bots, only search bots
If bot isnt malware then try robots.txt:
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
For malware bots, you can trace IP from web server log and ban it. Apache/nginx have that options.
