blackholebots

Blackhole for Bad Bots protects your PrestaShop store from malicious crawlers and scrapers that disregard your robots.txt directives. It works by embedding a hidden link on every page of your store that points to a forbidden URL. Well-behaved robots that follow robots.txt will never visit this link, but bad bots that ignore crawling rules will trigger the trap — and their IP addresses will be automatically added to a blacklist, permanently blocking them from accessing your site.

• Automatically bans bots that access a hidden forbidden URL planted on your site
• Sends the store administrator an email notification for each new blacklist entry, including WHOIS data such as IP address, location, and network information
• Hidden link is invisible to regular human visitors but fully visible to crawlers in the page source
• Requires a one-time manual edit to robots.txt before installation to instruct compliant bots to avoid the trap URL
• Blacklisted IPs can be manually removed from the database table PREFIX_blackholebots_blacklist

This module is a straightforward solution for store owners troubled by aggressive or non-compliant scrapers consuming server resources or harvesting product data. It is best suited for administrators comfortable with making a small robots.txt edit and, if needed, performing occasional manual database adjustments to manage the blacklist.