Bad bots? Recently, we’ve seen more and more traffic from bad bots. Depending on who you ask, as much as 50% of all internet traffic is caused by bots — both malicious and good. Unfortunately, all of this bot activity can easily overload a cPanel server, especially if multiple sites are hit at once.
You can reduce the impact of bad bots by implementing effective bot-blocking techniques.
The simple method we use is to add a block rule to the pre-virtual host configuration in Apache.
Adjust this to block the bots that are causing you issues. After adding, just apply and restart Apache.
<IfModule mod_headers.c> <Location /> SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Baiduspider" bad_bot SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "YandexBot" bad_bot SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "MJ12bot" bad_bot SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "AhrefsBot" bad_bot SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "SemrushBot" bad_bot SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "BLEXBot" bad_bot SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Sogou Spider" bad_bot SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "SeznamBot" bad_bot <RequireAll> Require all granted Require not env bad_bot </RequireAll> </Location> </IfModule>
