Site under bot attack Options

[Resident Evil]

I know that this is an HTML forum, but I thought I would ask anyway since you guys seem very knowledgeable and maybe you can offer any advice.

Anyway for the past few weeks my site has been getting a large amount of Bot Traffic. These are not spiderbots, they are registering as real visitors. They show up on a variety of different IP addresses, as well as valid ISP's like Comcast, etc. When I trace the IP addresses there is no mention of anything bad in reference to them. They also show up on a variety of IP addresses, so even if I knew which ones were the bots and banned those IP's, the bots would still show up.

What the bots do is go to my home page, stay on if for about 5 seconds, then leave. This is ruining my bounce rate. There are about 6,000 to 8,000 hits a day from these bots, but I am afraid it might go up, and if it keeps getting higher it will eventually cause server issues. I am on my own server and can handle the traffic, but I would like to stop this in case there is a major increase in bot attacks.

I have no idea where they bots came from. They are showing as direct traffic, no backlinks, search engine, etc. They are coming straight to the site. I did notice that these bots do not use www when they visit my site. So instead of them going to www.htmlhelp.com, they go to htmlhelp.com and since they visit my main home page, I cannot delete the page.

What I have seen so far is that these bots are showing up as Windows 7 and IE 9 users. I don't want to block IE9 users from my site since I am sure there are many valid users on that browser. So any other ideas? Is there a code I can put somewhere to help determine if it is a bot, and then automatically block them from the site?

Thanks

[jimlongo]

Do a whois on the IP address, I'll bet it's a search engine.