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
-
Huge Drop in Direct Traffic in G4
Our direct traffic dropped 50% in October. Is anyone else seeing a drop in direct traffic in October in G4? It hasn't shifted to another source or unassigned it's just gone. Has anyone else experienced this and what might be the reasons?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 12, 2024, 2:03 AM | inhouseninja1 -
Can Google Bot View Links on a Wix Page?
Hi, The way Wix is configured you can't see any of the on-page links within the source code. Does anyone know if Google Bots still count the links on this page? Here is the page in question: https://www.ncresourcecenter.org/business-directory If you do think Google counts these links, can you please send me URL fetcher to prove that the links are crawlable? Thank you SO much for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 7, 2017, 6:55 PM | Fiyyazp0 -
Why is my Bing traffic dropping?
In the middle of September we launched a redesigned version of our site. The urls all stayed the same. Since site launch traffic in Google has steadily increased but Bing traffic has dropped by about 50%. Any ideas on what I should look at?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 5, 2016, 4:08 PM | EcommerceSite0 -
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 -
Lost 86% of traffic after moving old static site to WordPress
I hired a company to convert an old static website www.rawfoodexplained.com with about 1200 pages of content to WordPress. Four days after launch it lost almost 90% of traffic. It was getting over 60,000 uniques while nobody touched the site for several years. It’s been 21 days since the WordPress launch. I read a lot of stuff prior to moving it (including Moz's case study) and I was expecting to lose in short term 30% of traffic max… I don’t understand what is wrong. The internal link structure is the same, every url is 301 to the same url only without[dot]html (ie www.rawfoodexplained.com/science.html is 301′s to http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/science/ ), it’s added to Google Webmaster tool and Google indexed the new pages… Any ideas what could be possible wrong? I do understand the website is not optimized (meta descriptions etc, but it wasn't before either) .... Do you think putting back the old site would recover the traffic? I would appreciate any thoughts Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 20, 2013, 12:01 PM | JakubH0 -
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 | Oct 19, 2013, 10:13 AM | melbog0 -
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 -
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 | Oct 12, 2012, 6:24 PM | boxcarpress0