Block bad bots with a targeted trap
Blackhole Pro is a WordPress security plugin for dealing with bad bots, spammers, scrapers, scanners, and other automated threats. It uses a hidden trigger link and your site’s robots.txt rules to identify bots that ignore or disobey those instructions. When a bot follows the forbidden link, it can be denied further access according to the plugin’s one-strike approach.
The trap is designed to stay invisible to human visitors. Major search engines and other useful bots are whitelisted by user agent, while administrators can adjust the whitelist and define additional rules. The plugin works silently behind the scenes and does not use or require .htaccess rules.
Pro controls for practical site management
Blackhole Pro adds tools for sites that need more control over bot handling and reporting. You can disable the plugin for logged-in users, set the number of allowed hits through threshold control, and choose what happens when a bot is blocked.
- Send custom email alerts for blocked bots.
- Display custom messages to blocked bots.
- Redirect blocked bots to a chosen destination.
- Use custom blackhole trigger links.
- Set a custom HTTP status code.
- Block bots by user agent or IP address.
- Whitelist or allow bots by user agent or IP address.
- Redirect whitelisted bots when required.
The full-featured Bad Bot Log includes paging, sorting, and field search. Administrators can manually add bad bots to the log, review the number of blocked hits for each bot, and use geo/IP location lookups for individual entries. These tools help turn automated traffic handling into a more visible, manageable workflow.
Designed for focused bot control
The plugin is lightweight, modular, and built with the WordPress API. Its settings screen provides configurable options, a Help tab includes inline documentation, and a one-click option can restore the plugin’s default settings. The bad bot list can be reset or individual bots can be deleted when your records need maintenance.
By default, major search engines including Googlebot, Bingbot/MSN, Yahoo!, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, AOL.com, and Teoma are whitelisted by user agent. The whitelist can be customized through the plugin settings. Blackhole Pro also stores the IP address, user agent, and other request data for bots that fall into the trap in the WordPress database. Saved data can be deleted through the settings.
Installation and setup
- Install and activate Blackhole Pro in WordPress.
- Open the plugin settings and review the available whitelist, threshold, alert, message, redirect, and logging options.
- Add the required Blackhole rules to an actual robots.txt file. The plugin does not create or add the robots.txt file or its rules for you.
- Customize blocking, allowing, and response behavior to suit your site.
Important: Do not use Blackhole Pro on a site with caching. Review the Help tab for the plugin’s setup guidance before enabling the trap.
