Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Regular Expressions for Filtering BOT Traffic?
-
I've set up a filter to remove bot traffic from Analytics. I relied on regular expressions posted in an article that eliminates what appears to be most of them.
However, there are other bots I would like to filter but I'm having a hard time determining the regular expressions for them.
How do I determine what the regular expression is for additional bots so I can apply them to the filter?
I read an Analytics "how to" but its over my head and I'm hoping for some "dumbed down" guidance.
-
No problem, feel free to reach out if you have any other RegEx related questions.
Regards,
Chris
-
I will definitely do that for Rackspace bots, Chris.
Thank you for taking the time to walk me through this and tweak my filter.
I'll give the site you posted a visit.
-
If you copy and paste my RegEx, it will filter out the rackspace bots. If you want to learn more about Regular Expressions, here is a site that explains them very well, though it may not be quite kindergarten speak.
-
Crap.
Well, I guess the vernacular is what I need to know.
Knowing what to put where is the trick isn't it? Is there a dummies guide somewhere that spells this out in kindergarten speak?
I could really see myself botching this filtering business.
-
Not unless there's a . after the word servers in the name. The . is escaping the . at the end of stumbleupon inc.
-
Does it need the . before the )
-
Ok, try this:
^(microsoft corp|inktomi corporation|yahoo! inc.|google inc.|stumbleupon inc.|rackspace cloud servers)$|gomez
Just added rackspace as another match, it should work if the name is exactly right.
Hope this helps,
Chris
-
Agreed! That's why I suggest using it in combination with the variables you mentioned above.
-
rackspace cloud servers
Maybe my problem is I'm not looking in the right place.
I'm in audience>technology>network and the column shows "service provider."
-
How is it titled in the ISP report exactly?
-
For example,
Since I implemented the filter four days ago, rackspace cloud servers have visited my site 848 times, , visited 1 page each time, spent 0 seconds on the page and bounced 100% of the time.
What is the reg expression for rackspace?
-
Time on page can be a tricky one because sometimes actual visits can record 00:00:00 due to the way it is measured. I'd recommend using other factors like the ones I mentioned above.
-
"...a combination of operating system, location, and some other factors can do the trick."
Yep, combined with those, look for "Avg. Time on Page = 00:00:00"
-
Ok, can you provide some information on the bots that are getting through this that you want to sort out? If they are able to be filtered through the ISP organization as the ones in your current RegEx, you can simply add them to the list: (microsoft corp| ... ... |stumbleupon inc.|ispnamefromyourbots|ispname2|etc.)$|gomez
Otherwise, you might need to get creative and find another way to isolate them (a combination of operating system, location, and some other factors can do the trick). When adding to the list, make sure to escape special characters like . or / by using a \ before them, or else your RegEx will fail.
-
Sure. Here's the post for filtering the bots.
Here's the reg x posted: ^(microsoft corp|inktomi corporation|yahoo! inc.|google inc.|stumbleupon inc.)$|gomez
-
If you give me an idea of how you are isolating the bots I might be able to help come up with a RegEx for you. What is the RegEx you have in place to sort out the other bots?
Regards,
Chris
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to handle sorting, filtering, and pagination in ecommerce? Canonical is enough?
Hello, after reading various articles and watching several videos I'm still not sure how to handle faceted navigation (sorting/filtering) and pagination on my ecommerce site. Current indexation status: The number of "real" pages (from my sitemap) - 2.000 pages Google Search Console (Valid) - 8.000 pages Google Search Console (Excluded) - 44.000 pages Additional info: Vast majority of those 50k additional pages (44 + 8 - 2) are pages created by sorting, filtering and pagination. Example of how the URL changes while applying filters/sorting: example.com/category --> example.com/category/1/default/1/pricefrom/100 Every additional page is canonicalized properly, yet as you can see 6k is still indexed. When I enter site:example.com/category in Google it returns at least several results (in most of the cases the main page is on the 1st position). In Google Analytics I can see than ~1.5% of Google traffic comes to the sorted/filtered pages. The number of pages indexed daily (from GSC stats) - 3.000 And so I have a few questions: Is it ok to have those additional pages indexed or will the "real" pages rank higher if those additional would not be indexed? If it's better not to have them indexed should I add "noindex" to sorting/filtering links or add eg. Disallow: /default/ in robots.txt? Or perhaps add "noindex, nofollow" to the links? Google would have then 50k pages less to crawl but perhaps it'd somehow impact my rankings in a negative way? As sorting/filtering is not based on URL parameters I can't add it in GSC. Is there another way of doing that for this filtering/sorting url structure? Thanks in advance, Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thpchlk0 -
Huge Spike in Organic/Direct traffic from Mexico
So here's my situation: My company's website usually receives around 80 organic visits/month and 50 direct visits/month from Mexico. However, in July we saw a small uptick to around 170 for each and then in the last 7 days we are in the middle of a massive spike which has put us up to 1400 visits for organic and 820 visits for direct in August. The traffic spike continues as we are almost up to 500 visits just today! Things to know: The visitors are purchasing from our store, staying on our site, browsing around, basically acting like real traffic. I was unable to identify any new links, press, and we did not do any specific Mexico optimization (spanish keywords). We sell a ball and it is called The One World Futbol, but it's always been called a futbol before so nothing new here. our website is www.oneworldplayproject.com. Everyone coming organically is searching our name, not keywords. We updated our shopping cart a few days before the massive traffic spike and significantly lowered the cost to ship to Mexico. Our Latin America director went to Mexico to work there for a month a few days before the spike and sent out a bunch of emails, texts, phone calls, what's app notifications to his large network. From what I am told by others here he has a vast network throughout Mexico, Central America and South America. We have also seen large traffic increases in other Latin American countries during this same time period just nothing like Mexico. We just hired an awesome social media coordinator who is extremely focused and is implementing a kick-ass social strategy We launched a branding campaign called #MakeLifePlayFull with press releases and ad spend behind it. PHEW! That was a lot of info for you to digest. So on the surface this seems like great news. BUT I want to understand WHY this is happening. Could it really just be the combination of all these things listed above or is it just a combination of our connected guy being in Mexico with better shipping costs? Why is it mainly happening in Mexico? Why is it so sustained? I suspect that if it is from our guy it would drop off quickly. Any thoughts on what to look at? I'm stumped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP0 -
Does blocking foreign country IP traffic to site, hurt my SEO / US Google rankings?
I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors. 99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US. But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account. I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others. But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this. I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly. However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site? Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches. At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?
Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present. I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions? Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects) They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed. The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages. The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language. Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues. Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt Canonical URLs are good Site has about 20K pages indexed They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped. I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences. It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site. Page load speed is good I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Why do I get India, Pakistan, Turkey traffic mostly?
Hi there, I've been wondering. Why do I get most of the traffic from these countries? My sites are english, I host in USA. I don't target a thing for those countries traffic, yet I get huge amounts of traffic from these countries. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melbog0 -
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic. For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down. Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last? We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WaySEO0 -
Url structure for multiple search filters applied to products
We have a product catalog with several hundred similar products. Our list of products allows you apply filters to hone your search, so that in fact there are over 150,000 different individual searches you could come up with on this page. Some of these searches are relevant to our SEO strategy, but most are not. Right now (for the most part) we save the state of each search with the fragment of the URL, or in other words in a way that isn't indexed by the search engines. The URL (without hashes) ranks very well in Google for our one main keyword. At the moment, Google doesn't recognize the variety of content possible on this page. An example is: http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html#style=vintage&color=blue&season=spring We're moving towards a more indexable URL structure and one that could potentially save the state of all 150,000 searches in a way that Google could read. An example would be: http://www.example.com/main-keyword/vintage/blue/spring/ I worry, though, that giving so many options in our URL will confuse Google and make a lot of duplicate content. After all, we only have a few hundred products and inevitably many of the searches will look pretty similar. Also, I worry about losing ground on the main http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html page, when it's ranking so well at the moment. So I guess the questions are: Is there such a think as having URLs be too specific? Should we noindex or set rel=canonical on the pages whose keywords are nested too deep? Will our main keyword's page suffer when it has to share all the inbound links with these other, more specific searches?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress0
