Based on the experience of ShieldSquare with customers globally, we suggest below recommended actions for different Legitimate-bot types.


Legitimate-bot traffic does not have any malicious intention.  These are bots that check the system health of the website, check website backlinks, run by social network sites, Ad networks and which collate information from other sites. Some legitimate-bots bring traffic to your site. But all legitimate-bots are not useful to the website. So we categorized legitimate-bots into 5 types to let you take action based on the traffic.


  • Monitoring Bots – Bots which are used to monitor the system health of the customer's websites (e.g. Pingdom). ShieldSquare recommended action is “Allow” as the site has to allow these bots for system health checking. If some Monitoring bots have to be restricted from your site, inform ShiedSquare about it and we will blacklist those.

  • Backlink checker bots – These categories of bots check the backlinks of the URLs (e.g. UASlinkChecker). ShieldSquare recommended action is “Block” as most of these does not have any usage to the website. If your website is using any of these bots for SEO, inform ShiedSquare about it and we will whitelist those.

  • Social Network Bots - Bots which are run by social network sites (e.g facebookbot). ShieldSquare recommended action is “Allow” as Social network may bring traffic to the site. If some Social Network bots have to be restricted from your site, inform ShiedSquare about it and we will blacklist those.

  • Partner bots - Partner bots which are useful to the website (e.g. Paypal IPN). ShieldSquare recommended action is “Allow” as these are partner bots and helpful to the website. If some Partner bots have to be restricted from your site, inform ShiedSquare about it and we will blacklist those.

  • Aggregator bots - Bots which collate information from other websites (e.g. WikioFeedBot). These bots are from Aggregators /  sites which bring traffic to the website. ShieldSquare recommended action is “Allow” as they bring traffic to the site. If some Aggregator bots have to be restricted from your site, inform ShiedSquare about it and we will blacklist those.


Reach out to support@shieldsquare.com for any queries.