What happens when a bot follows the hidden link

Blackhole Pro uses a hidden trigger link on your WordPress pages to identify bots that ignore the instructions in your robots.txt file. A bot that follows the forbidden link can be denied further access after the allowed-hit threshold. Human visitors do not see the link, and the add-on does not use or require .htaccess rules.

Your theme must include wp_footer() for the trigger link to appear. Major search engines, including Googlebot, Bingbot/MSN, Yahoo!, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, AOL.com, and Teoma, are whitelisted by user agent by default. You can edit the whitelist in the options.

Choose how bot requests are handled

Set the number of allowed hits, disable the plugin for logged-in users, and manage bots by user agent or IP address. For blocked bots, Blackhole Pro can send custom email alerts, display a custom message, redirect to a chosen destination, or return a custom HTTP status code. You can also use a custom trigger link and redirect whitelisted bots when needed.

The Bad Bot Log supports paging, sorting, and field search. Add bots to the log manually, review blocked-hit counts, and execute Geo/IP location lookups for individual entries.

Set up the trap without caching

Important: Do not use Blackhole Pro on a website with caching. Review the plugin’s Help tab before enabling the trap.

1. Install and activate Blackhole Pro in WordPress.
2. Review the whitelist, threshold, alert, message, redirect, and logging settings.
3. Add the required Blackhole rules to an actual robots.txt file. The plugin does not make the file or add these rules for you.
4. Adjust the blocking, allow-list, and response options for your website.

The plugin stores the IP address, user agent, and other request data for trapped bots in the WordPress database. Administrators can delete saved data through the settings. A one-click option restores the default settings, and the bot list can be reset or individual entries deleted.