Page 26 - Cyber Warnings

Five Best Practices To Protect Your Competitive Advantage in

Online Businesses

By Srilekha Veena Sankaran, Content Marketer, ShieldSquare

A website’s content is what reflects the thought leadership and brand value of the business. So,
protecting the site’s proprietary content, such as property listing, user reviews, product
catalogue, financial news, etc., from malicious bot traffic and content scrapers is of utmost
importance to an online business owner.

It’s a known fact that content scraping is rampant in this industry, and online businesses should
make it a point to pull the plug on bad bots hitting their websites.

When scrapers scrape your site content, your competitive advantage is negatively impacted.

Having a legally binding terms of service (ToS), or a restrictive robots.txt will hardly help protect
your content from scraping and malicious attacks. This is because bots are not designed to
abide by the rules, but only to scrape content.

So, how do we stop bad bots from biting into your content? You may consider these five ways to
secure your Web content:

1) Use CAPTCHAs When Necessary. CAPTCHAs are specifically designed to
differentiate human beings from bots. That said, CAPTCHAs should be used whenever a
sensitive information is to be disclosed.

A word of caution: though Captchas are highly useful, they should be used sparingly.
Too many CAPTCHAs will hamper genuine user experience, and may not be the optimal
solution to stop bots.

2) Blocking Individual IP Addresses. You can block an IP address if you are receiving
thousands of requests from a single machine.

This is a lot of time-consuming manual work, especially when scrapers use multiple
machines to send multiple requests, so that only a specific number of requests come
from an IP.

3) Update Your Website’s HTML Periodically. Some scrapers might rely on your
website’s HTML markup pattern, so updating it on a regular basis will confuse them.

26 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – June 2016 Edition
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