Independent Analytics recognizes and ignores activity from over 500 self-identifying bots. This includes search engine bots, SEO crawlers, and uptime monitoring services.
However, Independent Analytics makes no attempt to recognize malicious bots that disguise themselves as human visitors. We view the detection of these bots as outside the scope of our product.
Instead, we recommend using Cloudflare, which has excellent security rules for blocking bots included in its free tier. If you are unable to use the Cloudflare CDN, then we recommend using the Wordfence plugin, which can also block bots with its firewall.
Bad bots should be blocked entirely
It’s important to understand that when you get a visit from a self-identifying bot, like a search engine bot, Independent Analytics does not block it from accessing your site. It only ignores the bot so that its activity doesn’t show up in your stats.
If you are getting traffic from a malicious bot, you wouldn’t want to ignore it in your analytics but still allow it to access your website. This malicious bot could be submitting spam, testing for vulnerabilities, or scraping your site, using up valuable bandwidth. It would be best to deny this bot access to your site entirely, and that can be done with a firewall added to your site using either Cloudflare or Wordfence (or both).
