Unlocking the Potential of Active and Friendly Robots: Maximizing Productivity and Helpful Impact
The recent Imperva Incapsula Bot Traffic Report, in its fifth edition, provided insights into the current patterns of bot traffic, encompassing both positive and negative bot activities.
In the past year, overall bot activity witnessed a notable surge, primarily driven by an increase in positive bot traffic. Upon closer examination, we identified the top-performing good bots, responsible for generating over 84 percent of the total good bot traffic.
In 2016, a total of 35 bots stood out as the primary contributors to the substantial volume of good bot traffic. These bots can be categorized into four groups: search engine bots, commercial crawlers, feed fetchers, and monitoring bots.
Search Engine Bots
These bots are utilized by search engines to explore websites, verify links, retrieve content, and update their indices.
- Googlebot: An internet search engine bot utilized by Google, the most extensively used search engine globally.
- Yandex bot: A search bot employed by Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia.
- MSN/Bingbot: A search bot utilized by Microsoft to index websites for the Bing search engine, having replaced the MSN bot in 2010.
- Yahoo! Slurp bot: One of the search bots (alongside Bingbot) used by the Yahoo search engine.
- MJ12Bot: A search bot employed for website indexing by Majestic-12, a UK-based search engine and SEO backlink checker.
- Baiduspider: A search bot used by Baidu, the dominant Chinese search engine.
- Mail.Ru bot: A search engine bot utilized by the Mail.Ru group, the leading email service provider in Russia.
- Haosou 360 spider: A search bot employed by Qihoo 360, China’s second most popular search engine.
- Sogou spider: A search bot used by Sogou, one of China’s prominent search engines.
- Google AdsBot: A search bot responsible for evaluating landing page quality, thereby influencing their rankings in Google search results.
Commercial Crawlers
These are bots utilized by commercial entities for website crawling and data retrieval purposes.
- AhrefsBot: A crawler bot managed by Ahrefs, a marketing and SEO tool primarily employed as a backlink checker.
- Proximic bot: A crawler bot used by Proximic, a platform facilitating the matching of ad campaigns to website content.
- SEMrushBot: A crawler bot operated by SEMrush, a platform offering SEO data, including keyword research and backlink information.
- Dotmic DotBot: A crawler bot specialized in identifying e-commerce websites, product names, pricing data, and descriptions.
- Pinterest bot: A crawler bot employed by Pinterest, a social media application enabling users to share and manage photo collections.
- YisouSpider: A crawler bot managed by the Chinese search engine Yisou.
- XoviBot: A crawler bot utilized by Xovi GmbH, a marketing solution providing SEO, search analytics, and link management services.
- ADmantX bot: A crawler bot operated by ADmantX, a data analysis provider assisting marketers in developing effective online campaigns.
- Grapeshot bot: A crawler bot employed by Grapeshot, a keyword technology company specializing in automated page classification through webpage content analysis.
- Alexa bot: A crawler bot utilized by Alexa, an Amazon subsidiary offering website traffic data and analytics.
Feed Fetchers
These are bots programmed to retrieve data that can be displayed on websites.
- Facebook Mobile app – A feed fetcher that retrieves website information to be viewed in Facebook’s in-app browser.
- Android Framework bot – A feed fetcher used by Android Runtime environment to retrieve content for mobile apps.
- CFNetwork bot – A feed fetcher used by the CFNetwork framework in iPhone apps.
- .NET WebClient – A feed fetcher associated with the .NET framework, a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows.
- Facebook external hit – A feed fetcher used by Facebook to retrieve details, such as thumbnail images or video tags, associated with shared links.
- Windows Phone WebClient – A feed fetcher used by Windows Phone webclient to fetch website information for viewing in mobile apps.
- Adobe AIR – A feed fetcher used by Adobe AIR runtime environment to retrieve content for native apps running on desktop and mobile platforms.
- Google Feedfetcher – A feed fetcher used by Google to retrieve RSS and Atom feeds for display on website homepages.
- Twitter bot – A feed fetcher that retrieves details associated with external links displayed on Twitter.
- FeedBurner – A feed fetcher used by publishers to manage custom RSS feeds.
Monitoring Bots
These bots are employed for monitoring diverse performance indicators on websites.
- WordPress (pingback): A monitoring bot enabling WordPress users to notify bloggers when they have linked to their site.
- Paessler Monitor: A monitoring bot utilized by Paessler, a web-based platform that monitors networks for system outages.
- UptimeBot: A monitoring bot employed by Uptime, a service specializing in website performance monitoring.
- Site24X7 tools: A monitoring bot used by Site24x7, a provider of website performance monitoring services.
- Keynote: A monitoring bot operated by Keynote, a cloud-based mobile app monitoring solutions provider.