Can Bots ruin SEO potential? Robots that visit your site, overall SEO

[mixtapekid457]

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to figure out if large visits from robots, will ruin my sites SEO. I have had a robot visit my site 147,000 times this month, which usually consists of less than zero seconds on my site. Is Google smart enough to understand it's a bot, and it will not affect my overall SEO?. Also, if it's less than zero seconds, can the analytics code even load? One last thing,this is not a Google bot or other search bot: it's an unknown bot(or at least it says that in my crawl logs). Thanks for your help.

[rish3]

It would not have a direct SEO effect, but it could affect SEO through some side effects, for example:

- The crawl rate is such that it impacts your site's responsiveness enough for Google to demote you. Keep in mind that your site has to be really sluggish for Google to do this.

- The robot is doing something that creates backlinks on your site. For example, if you have a life referer log, robots can potentially inject links. Or, perhaps the robot is spamming comments that you choose to auto-approve.

- The robot is scraping your content and then later, republishing it elsewhere, creating duplicate content.

In short, it's not the visit itself, it's the purpose of the the visit and what else the robot is doing.

[Rasputin]

I have never heard of a situation where a 'bad bot' causes problems for google or seo, unless it is causing server overload problems that are slowing down or crashing the whole site.

You can add code to htaccess that blocks bad bots (there is a 'standard' list, on github I think) and also slow down bingbot and others that actually respect robots.txt with an entry in that file (i had bingbot crashing sites for a while)

[rainborick]

Keep in mind that bots rarely execute JavaScript, so Google and the other search engines are generally not aware of their activities.

[mixtapekid457]

I know the bot is running PHP, at least that's what it said in my crawl logs.

[phranque]

if your server is configured properly, the bot will never see the PHP in the response.

[netmeg]

LOTS of bots execute javascript now.

It can also be an issue if you run any advertising on your site (particularly if the bot is executing javascript) Some bots actually click.

[rainborick]

Boy, that's not my experience. At least not spam/rogue bots. I have my own tracking scripts that rely on JavaScript on a few of my sites and I just don't see it. I know Googlebot executes JavaScript to some extent and I assume BingBot/MSNBot does some similar processing by now, but what other kinds of bots do you see doing it?

[netmeg]

Well we have a nice long thread in the AdSense forum:

[webmasterworld.com...]

And an even longer thread in the Analytics forum:

[webmasterworld.com...]

There's a whole forum devoted to bots that deals with it somewhat:

[webmasterworld.com...]

And I've written a couple of posts on the subject myself:

[netmeg.com...]

and

[netmeg.com...]

That should be enough to get you started.

[FranticFish]

I guess it depends on the level of competition and the skill of the person programming the bot.

I've not yet come across a spam bot (harvesters and link droppers) that ran Javascript - at least not on the SME sites I look after. We replaced CAPTCHAs in forms across a number of sites a while ago (because even reCaptcha was being defeated regularly) and use a combination of Javascript and PHP and it has not failed once in hundreds of thousands of instances.