Blackhole for Bad Bots

Screenshots

Add your own virtual Blackhole trap for bad bots. The Blackhole plugin includes a hidden link to your pages. You then add a line to your robots.txt file that forbids bots from following the hidden link. Bots that ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the honeypot trap. Once trapped, bad bots are denied further access to your WordPress-powered website. I call it the “one-strike” rule: bots have one chance to obey your site’s robots.txt rule. Failure to comply results in immediate banishment. The best part is that the Blackhole only affects bad bots: human users never see the hidden link, and good bots obey the robots rules in the first place. Win-win! ðŸ™? Using a caching plugin? Check out the Installation notes for important info. Features Easy to set up Squeaky clean code Focused and modular Born of simplicity, no frills Lightweight, fast and flexible Built with the WordPress API Works with other security plugins Easy to reset the list of bad bots Easy to delete any bot from the list Blackhole link includes “nofollow” attribute Plugin options configurable via settings screen Works silently behind the scenes to protect your site Whitelists all major search engines to never block Focused on flexibility, performance, and security Email alerts with WHOIS lookup for blocked bots Complete inline documentation via the Help tab Provides setting to whitelist any IP addresses Customize the message displayed to bad bots 😉 One-click restore plugin default options Blackhole for Bad Bots protects your site against bad bots, spammers, scrapers, scanners, and other automated threats. Not using WordPress? Check out the standalone PHP version of Blackhole! Pro version now available » Whitelist By default, this plugin does NOT block any of the major search engines: AOL.com Baidu Bingbot/MSN DuckDuckGo Googlebot Teoma Yahoo! Yandex These search engines (and all of their myriad variations) are whitelisted. They always are allowed full access to your site, even if they disobey your robots.txt rules. This list can be customized in the plugin settings. Header Image Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Support development of this plugin I develop and maintain this free plugin with love for the WordPress community. To show support, you can make a cash donation, bitcoin donation, or purchase one of my books: The Tao of WordPress Digging into WordPress .htaccess made easy WordPress Themes In Depth And/or purchase one of my premium WordPress plugins: BBQ Pro – Pro version of Block Bad Queries Blackhole Pro – Pro version of Blackhole for Bad Bots SES Pro – Super-simple & flexible email signup forms USP Pro – Pro version of User Submitted Posts Links, tweets and likes also appreciated. Thanks! ðŸ™?