If you are using Google Analytics on your websites, you may have found a number of sites linking to yours generating a lot of hits. Hits are great, unless its not a user, but a botnet looking to use your site for nefarious purposes. Some of this traffic is from unscrupulus SEO tactics that may lead to your sites loosing its ranking or being removed from search results all together. Some of the traffic is from automated bots looking to “hack” your website using well known exploits that you haven’t patched against. Either way, I dont want them on my clients websites.
There are many ways to block them, but the one that has worked well for us is just using a .htaccess file and blocking the referrer domains. My .htaccess file looks like this
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# Block Common Botnets
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer fbdownloader.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer descargar-musicas-gratis.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer baixar-musicas-gratis.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer savetubevideo.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer srecorder.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer kambasoft.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer semalt.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ilovevitaly.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer 7makemoneyonline.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer buttons-for-website.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer econom.co spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer acunetix-referrer.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer yougetsignal.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer darodar.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer priceg.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer cenoval.ru spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer bestwebsitesawards.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer aliexpress.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer social-buttons.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer best-seo-offer.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer buttons-for-your-website.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer www.Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer googlsucks.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer theguardlan.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer www.Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com spambot=yes
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=spambot
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Every week more and more sites get added to the list. For an updated list, check out www.aclbuilder.com