Feature Showcase: Bot Identification HTTP Headers

Hey there!

As you may know, we at Priority Prospect love innovation and making our clients happy. That’s why we are back with a new feature showcase. Today we are showing you our newest feature: bot identification HTTP headers.

Whoa, what is a bot identification header?

It’s a header that our network attaches to you web browser request. There are total of 3 new headers that we added to requests.

1. PP-BOT: Its possible values are 0 and 1. 0 means that we couldn’t identify the visitor or we are sure that visitor is not a bot. 1 means that the visitor is bot.
2. PP-BOT-TYPE: Its possible values right now are: GOOGLEBOT, BINGBOT, BAIDUSPIDER, YANDEXBOT, AHREFSBOT, SEMRUSHBOT, M12BOT. If the visitor is not any of those types, this header will not be included in the request. We can identify thousands of bots, but since these 7 are most relevant to our customers we decided to include only those. If you have other bots that you want us to display, please let us know.
3. PP-COUNTRY: As the name says, it’s just a header containing visitor’s country code in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 format eg: EE, US, AU, CA, etc.

What can I do with those headers?

I’m glad you asked, here comes the fun part. You can cloak your money site links. This problem is very relevant these days considering that Ahrefs and Semrush are not following robots.txt rules and blocking bots becomes a lot more difficult since there’s just so many of them.

Here’s a simple pseudo code example:

if PP-BOT is 1 and PP-BOT-TYPE is "GOOGLEBOT":
    return '<a href="https://monesite.com">Money Keyword</a>'
else:
    return '<a href="https://cloakyurl.com">Cloak Anchor</a>'

You can use same method to hide your affiliate links, pieces or whole blocks of content or whatever you need to do.

Here’s how you can use them with PHP:

1. $_SERVER['HTTP_PP_BOT']
2. $_SERVER['HTTP_PP_BOT_TYPE']
3. $_SERVER['HTTP_PP_COUNTRY']

You may also use htaccess like this to block all visitors from Russia and China:

RewriteCond %{HTTP:PP-COUNTRY} ^(RU|CN)$
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Conclusion

That’s it for today. Now it’s time to become creative. If you see false positives, make sure you contact us ASAP! We are planning to create a plugin for WordPress to make link cloaking easier. If you have any suggestions, let us know.

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that this feature is experimental and may not display valid information. Priority Prospect OÜ does not take any responsibility for any kind of problems that may occur including deindexing of the website from search engines or financial loss.