Matomo is not prohibiting many Bots from being tracked

[Minalcar]

A lot of Bots are accessing my Website, which are still counted in the visitor log. This is screwing up all kinds metrics like visitor numbers, etc.
Here are some of the user Agents
""Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)"

"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +https://www.contentkingapp.com/)"

What can I do to prevent this?
Also the exclusion of User Agent in the admin interface when placing “Googlebot” in there seems to do nothing at atll.
I also have problems with crawlers that send no User Agent at all. All that is found in the user agent is two hyphens.

[Lukas (Lukas Winkler)]

Hi,

Both of your user agents are detected by device-detector (the device detector of Matomo; testable here).

What kind of tracking do you use (JS/PHP/Log Analytics)?

You can find more information about blocking bots without User Agents here on the forum:

Best way to filter out visitors without Javascript activated in the PHP tracker

We are tracking our whole website in PHP in the backend. We now get a lot of crawlers, hosted on AWS instances, who access the site once and leave again. We assume they are automated crawlers looking for vulnerabilities in our software stack. I want to filter them out and put the into a separate category. I don’t want to exclude them from tracking, since the information is still valuable to us. The problem is all those accesses are messing with our bounce rate, conversion rate and general hits. …

Bots nicht mitzählen oder bei den Reports rausfiltern

Hallo, ich nutze das PHP Tracking und habe so ca. 800(!) Besuche mehr am Tage als mit dem JavaScript Tracking. Ich denke, das liegt unter anderem an den Bots, da viele Seiten nur einen Aufruf haben. Wie kann ich die Bots entweder aussperren in den Reports rausfiltern (Dimension oder Segment?), also quasi Statistik mit Bots und ohne zählen der Bots ganz deaktivieren? Ich muss dazu sagen, das ich den Basic-Tarif in der Innocraft-Cloud habe, also nicht selber hoste. Danke & Viele Grüße Olli …

[Minalcar]

I am using PHP tracking. How is it possible that my tracking server doesn’t recognize the tow Bots?
Do I need to setup the device detector within my website’s code as well?

[Minalcar]

@Lukas I just found out the weirdest thing.
When I try the User Agent Strings at http://devicedetector.net/index.php The Bots are recognized, but not when I enter the same bot into my Matomo Admin page even though I use version 3.3.0 of Matomo

[matthieu (Matthieu Aubry)]

Hi @Minalcar
If you can reproduce this issue in the latest Matomo, please create a bug report at http://www.github.com/matomo-org/matomo/issues

We’ll investigate then. Thanks,