© epSos.de

You and I have probably read countless of blog posts on how we can increase traffic to our blogs. How we are to blog better in order to draw in more readers, how to bump traffic to our blogs and so on … there are thousands of articles on teaching us to how gain traffic to our websites. I know because I inhale them. Heck, who doesn’t want more traffic to their blogs, right?

See, the thing is, not all traffic is good. Not all the ‘hits’ to your website is good. It took me a long time to finally realise the sort of organic traffic I wanted and not links from spam sites. If you rent a self-hosted space with a web server, you actually have a limit to the bandwidth you’re alloted (it is shared space after all unless you purchase dedicated server space). This means that if you’re getting a lot of hits from spam sites, they’re the ones who are sucking your bandwidth quota which will cause trouble for you with your webhost.

First come the trolls. These are the people who leave horrid, non-constructive comments on your blog that do not contribute to anything. They exude negativity and hate on the blogosphere. These are the ones I don’t want leaving any footprints on my blog. They want to visit my blog? Why, I’ll thank them for increasing my traffic figure but if they think they’re going to leave a comment here, they can jolly well think again.

Then comes the almighty spam. I’m not going to write any of those keywords here because they will simply attract more unwanted spam but you know the ones I mean. They are the bane of the Internet, I tell ya.

Finally, there are the spiders. These are bots that crawl your site for information and feed them to other sites. Some spiders are good but a lot are bad. You’d want Google (or any other popular search enginers) spiders crawling your site and feeding them back to the search engine because that would be where the majority of your traffic will come from. They’ll be from search engines. However, there are also spiders bots from spam sites claiming to be legit websites crawling your site and feeding information back to their sites. For one, they’re stealing your content and feeding them back to their website. Secondly, this constant crawling means they’re constantly accessing your website (giving it the “hits”, so to speak), thus increasing the usage of bandwidth on your blog. This will also increase CPU usage and your webhost may even kick you out. I had a lot of issues with dodgy bots (mainly from China) accessing my website and even more issues trying to fix them with my old webhost.

I hope I haven’t scared you off yet. The reality is that not all traffic is desirable and you’ll have to get rid of the unwanted ones before they start to bog you and your blog down. Here are some ways you can try out to weed out bad traffic. Most of the steps below cater to WordPress users.

Blacklist unwanted comments and trolls

If you’re on WordPress, you can block specific commenters by blacklisting them. Whenever you get a comment on your blog posts, you’ll receive an email notification that also states the commenter’s IP address. Here’s what you can do:

1. Go to Settings -> Discussions -> Comment Blacklist.
2. Copy and paste the IP address of the person you want to block into the Comment Blacklist textbox. However, this will not work if the commenter moves from one computer to another to leave comments because the blacklist will be limited by specific IP addresses only.
3. You can also enter the email address of the person you want to block. As for me, I’ll enter both the email and the IP addresses just to play it safe.
4. Other than IP addresses, you can also enter keywords, names, etc you don’t want in the comments. If your blog is child-friendly, you might want to add in swear words here.

Unfortunately, Blogger users cannot block commenters or IP addresses as this is not allowed by Google. Any sort of IP address blocking cannot be done on the Blogger platform. However, if you have a self-hosted blog that uses the Blogger platform, then you will be able to block the IP address with the webhost. You just can’t do it on Blogger.

If you’re on Blogger and would like to block specific comments and spam, try 3rd party commenting systems like Disqus or Lifefyre. I’m not a fan of those purely for the user experience (lousy via mobile devices and you have to login to something just to comment) but as a blogger who wants to get rid of the high level of spam or block specific commenters, these 3rd party commenting systems have the ability to blacklist them, even if you’re on Blogger.

Blacklist the dodgy spider bots

As bots don’t leave comments on your blog, you can’t just blacklist them on the commenting level. These are the ones you have to kick out off your website altogether. This method applies to self-hosted blogs only.

Please note that this is advanced stuff so if you’re not sure what the spider bots are, please check with your webhost first before attempting anything.

Dodgy spider bots can be blocked from accessing your website altogether by blocking their IP addresses in your cPanel.

1. Go to cPanel -> Security -> IP Deny Manager
2. Add an IP address to deny access. This will block that IP address from even accessing your website, let alone leave a comment.
3. I find this tip particularly useful even to block trolls from accessing your website.

You can check what IP addresses are accessing your website in the raw access logs. Again, this is highly technical stuff so please don’t accidentally add any important IP addresses to block (once, my ex-webhost blocked Google from crawling my site. When I found out, I was absolutely livid. Apparently they had added the wrong IP address to blacklist and caused my traffic to tank significantly because Google wasn’t seeing the blog at all). For more information on how to check bandwidth usage via cPanel, please click here.

These are just a couple of ways you can block unwanted traffic to your site. Apologies if the post got a bit too technical. I tend to put my nerd cap on and forget to take it off at times.

Knowledge is power and once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to kick unwanted traffic out of your blog just like that *snap*.

If you’re lost somewhere in the blog post and need more information or help, please feel free to leave a comment below. I’ll try my best to answer your questions and help you out if I can. 🙂