Obviously, I do not believe that they do this in the purpose to acquire new leads. And I do believe that it is harmful for SEO since to rise the bounce rate considerably.
I’m trying to protect against them with the firewall option of Cloudflare. I’ve been looking for the IP of these webs sites and found that they all have the same IP despite they are coming from several countries.
I’ve set up an access rule to block them in Firewall Panel, but it doesn’t work and the spammy bots come back almost everyday.
you seeing them in google analytics right? I believe you should create firewall rule to block them by refer and not by the ip(as the bot who crawling your site with the fake refer doesn’t use the website ip)
rule like:
refer contains seo challenge (I will not block as probably some legal site can has seo in their domain) if they are still appearing then try to block
you should also read this article about how to solve it in analytics itself
I didn’t know this rule by refer, I will have a look and be carefull with this
It is not so much for analytics that preocupies me. People say on the net that these sites don’t affect SEO, but I’m not really sure about it. I don’t really understand the interest of spamming like this…
The main IP detected is : 217.23.10.44
But as explained in my message blocking by IP doesn’t work. As they send the bots from several countries, it can’t be the same IP for all of them. They probably use a fake one…
Sorry, but that doesnt make much sense. That IP is a Dutch address, if it is always the same address it should always be the same country and no, it cant be faked.
Considering you mentioned it is different countries and the IP block does not work we must assume that is not the address in question and that gets us back to square one. In this case blocking by referrer might be actually the best approach, assuming the domains you mentioned show up in the referrer.
Yes there is a trick with the IP, Many request from all over the world. Sometimes the same refering URL can be used by several countries in the same day. The general rule is one refering site by day.
May I ask you how to how to block by referer ? Is it free ? I didn’t find info on Google…
There wont be a trick. If it is the same IP it is the same country and the IP block should work. If it does not it is not the same IP
With a firewall rule. The easiest way would be to define a firewall rule for (http.referer contains "seo") and block matching requests, however that might also catch some genuine requests. Alternatively you could OR-chain several of these expressions.
