@fabulanebulae I wouldn’t get the app because visitor traffic blockers does not stop it. I have used ‘BM: Country blocker IP blocker’ and it does work as I tested my own country, Australia, but because the webcrawler isn’t coming from let’s say a specific source like a human would, it’s not being detected. If it’s bypassing google analytics, it will bypass any traffic blocking apps.
The solution is for the web crawler to just scan all your webpages. Mine has stopped on my end as I don’t have that many pages.
@fabulanebulae shouldn’t affect your sales, my store got some sales through and looking at my shopify analytics, its average from the amount of local visitors if you exclude singapore visitors traffic.
Thank you for providing such a clear and easy to understand solution.
I got my business partner (works in IT) to look over your solution and he is very much in agreement with you. We have over 600 individual product pages on our site so a long day for the bot ahead!
The ‘bad’ bots could have multiple reasons to scan multiple websites to gain data, we don’t know their true intentions, but they could be:
Stealing information such as website design, code, how the website built, customer information so they can spam them
Shopify apparently has great security and we shouldn’t need to worry, there are literally 1000s of bad bots out there and it seems this bot either is new and it showed up in our visitor counter, other bad bots usually scan websites and it doesn’t show up in our visitor counter, who knows, our sites could have been scanned by 10 other bad bots prior to this and we wouldn’t know… unless you’re a person who knows what theyre searching for when looking at analytics or security of your website.
Furthermore, you can google a list of ‘bad bots’ and block them scanning your website and put them in your robots.txt but thing is, you will be doing this forever as there are existing bad bots and new bad bots being creating everyday… so it’s impossible to block them all. But if you manage to find some, no harm putting them in the block list.
Seeing the many views on this topic, I am convinced this is a major nuisance. We have investigated all possibilities to block, but there is no way of preventing our content from being misused by these bots under the Shopify account. I believe Shopify herself should take effective measures on the server-side. Against Bytespider and similar abuse. It’s excessive, never ending hundreds of visits on a stroke ! Urgent!