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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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 | Aug 31, 2020, 7:57 PM | thpchlk0 -
How can I stop spam Google Organic traffic?
Hey Moz, I'm a rather experienced SEO who just encountered a problem I have never faced. I am hoping to get some advice or be pointed in the right direction. I just started work for a new client. Really great client and website. Nicer than most design/content. They will need some rel canonical work but that is not the issue here. The traffic looked great at first glance 131k visits in April. Google Analytics Acquisition Overview showed 94% of the traffic as organic. When I dug deeper and looked at the organic source I saw that Google was 99.9% of it. Normal enough. Then I looked at the time on site and my jaw dropped. 118,454 Organic New Users for Google only stayed on the site for 3 seconds. There is no way that the traffic is real. It does not match what Google Webmaster tools, Moz, and Ahrefs are telling me. How do I stop a service that is sending fake organic Google traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 6, 2016, 9:43 PM | placementLabs0 -
Robots.txt - Do I block Bots from crawling the non-www version if I use www.site.com ?
my site uses is set up at http://www.site.com I have my site redirected from non- www to the www in htacess file. My question is... what should my robots.txt file look like for the non-www site? Do you block robots from crawling the site like this? Or do you leave it blank? User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/video-sitemap.xml
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 17, 2015, 5:48 PM | morg454540 -
How to measure traffic for a keyword
Sitting in Country A I want to see how much traffic a particular keyword receives in Country B. Whats the best way to do it? Also, will the search results differ if I am analyzing the above sitting in Country A viz-a-viz Country B. In other words, will the IP of the country I am making the search from play a role in the results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 28, 2015, 11:01 AM | KS__0 -
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 | May 14, 2014, 6:02 AM | AdamThompson0 -
Best way to implement canonical tags on an ecommerce site with many filter options?
What would be the best way to add canonical tags to an ecommerce site with many filter options, for example, http://teacherexpress.scholastic.com? Should I include a canonical tag for all filter options under a category even though the pages don't have the same content? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 22, 2013, 9:51 PM | DA20130 -
Problems with ecommerce filters causing duplicate content.
We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site. We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this? We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue; adding "no index" to all filtered pages making the filters uncrawble using javascript Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 8, 2013, 5:05 AM | Silkstream0 -
Subdomain Blog Sitemap link - Add it to regular domain?
Example of setup:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 14, 2013, 3:21 PM | EEE3
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com). I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap. 1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol? 2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer. 3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap. Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done. Thanks!0