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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Sign up to join this communityI 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?
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.
robot.txt
Create a robot.txt
file with it's Content to block search bots that crawls your content:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
.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:
If you getting still high Traffic from bots, try to use a proxy (for Blogger: use a plugin) e.g. CloudFlare.
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.