by Anura Guruge
on June 11, 2022

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Elon Musk has been vehemently complaining of late that there are too many bots on Twitter — i.e., more than 5% of Twitter accounts are bots.

Well, Twitter isn’t the only platform plagued by bots.

WordPress, from my experience, is riddled with bots.

At least in my case I see too many ‘hits’ on my site, i.e., this Website, from bots. They totally distort my traffic stats. I don’t do these posts for bots! I do them for human consumption.

Yes, as you can see from the second image above I already use a plugin to eradicate SOME blogs from this site. But, it doesn’t seem to be enough. How else can you explain all the visits I get from Azerbaijan. I am sure it is a lovely country & the people are stellar, BUT for the world of me I cannot see what folks in Azerbaijan find so intriguing about my posts! I get more hits from Azerbaijan than I do from Canada or any European country bar my native U.K. That somehow does not seem right.

I would love to learn what percentage of WordPress traffic is bot generated. 

by Anura Guruge
on February 27, 2022

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I won’t mention the details for obvious (i.e., ‘security’) reasons but I had been noticing some incongruous traffic to this blog over the last few weeks. I had been waiting until I had some spare time to look into this. This afternoon, I did. I started by calling the OUTSTANDING, EXEMPLARY phone support at my hosting provider, ‘HostGator‘. [I am so glad that I picked HostGator as my new hosting company. They offer some really great support.]

They explained to me that this was probably BAD BOTS! I had never even thought of that. Yikes, BOTS visiting this blog. Is there nothing sacred?

They told me about this WP.org provided plugin: ‘Blackhole for Bad Bots‘. I checked it out. It is NOT a 3rd party plugin per se. WP.org supports it. I was game. Looked like exactly what I needed.

The only thing was updating the ‘robots.txt’ file. I needed help with that. HostGator AGAIN stepped in & did it for I. I am delighted.

Now, I have to wait & see if it works.

Just letting you know since this might be of use to YOU.