Final Thoughts

Before website owners decide to expend their resources on deterring webbots, they should ask themselves a few questions.

  • What can a webbot do with your website that a person armed with a browser cannot do?

  • Are your deterrents keeping desirable spiders (like search engines) from accessing your web pages?

  • Does an automated agent (that you want to thwart) pose an actual threat to your website? Is it possible that it may even provide a benefit, as a procurement bot might?

  • If your website contains information that needs to be protected from webbots, should that information really be online in the first place?

  • If you put information in a public place, do you really have the right to bar certain methods of reading it?

If you still insist on ...

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