Fast Company & Inc. Regain Control Over Their SEO & Digital Content with DataDome

The challenge: Battling content theft & SEO drops due to bad bots

When Gerald Killeen was hired as VP of Engineering at Mansueto Ventures, one of his first tasks was to tackle the bot traffic problem. Articles at their publications were being reproduced verbatim on pirated sites, outranking their original content in search engines. This unauthorized scraping was not only diverting traffic from the original websites but was severely affecting their ad revenue, as potential readers were directed to these pirated versions. “Mansueto Ventures heavily relies on SEO and organic traffic for both digital subscriptions and ad revenue,” Gerald explains. “At the time, we could see this bot activity in our logs, but we lacked a solution to properly analyze and deal with it.” 

Gerald and his team began their search for a bot protection provider that could block these sophisticated bots, restore Mansueto Ventures’ search engine rankings, and protect their business’s bottom line.

The solution: A fast, user-friendly platform with seamless integration

Gerald was looking for an anti-bot solution with minimal latency: “Speed was the top priority. We wanted the user experience to be affected as little as possible by the detection and mitigation of bots. In other words, we needed a latency of less than 100 milliseconds.”

In addition, the company needed a solution with an intuitive user interface that made it easy to monitor and report bot activity. After evaluating several options, Gerald found that many solutions were either too slow or lacked the user-friendly dashboard they needed for detailed reporting. DataDome emerged as the ideal solution, offering real-time bot detection and mitigation in less than 2 milliseconds!

DataDome’s seamless integration with their existing CDN, Fastly, further reinforced their decision, as the VP of Engineering remembers: “DataDome’s setup seamlessly fit into our existing infrastructure. Other solutions required traffic to be routed through their systems, which raised concerns about uptime reliability. With DataDome, if an issue arises, we can simply timeout and restart the request transaction without any significant delay.”

The results: Improved SEO rankings, increased ad revenue, & enhanced security

Within days of implementing DataDome, Mansueto Ventures saw an immediate reduction in bot traffic. Unauthorized scraping was virtually eliminated, resulting in a drastic decrease in pirated content appearing on other sites. This reduction allowed original articles to regain their rightful positions in search engine rankings, stabilizing SEO performance and bringing in more genuine traffic to their website. More traffic also allows them to increase their ad revenue.

Beyond scraping, DataDome’s bot detection revealed other threats that Gerald and his team had not fully realized: “We started with scraping as our primary concern,” he says, “but as we used the solution, we discovered that DDoS attempts were targeting us several times a day! So, we’ve found more security benefits than expected, which is very positive for us.”

The support from DataDome’s 24/7 SOC team also proved invaluable to the company. During high-profile incidents, Gerald’s team could quickly trigger emergency support, and the DataDome SOC team responded within minutes, providing immediate analysis and guidance. Their expertise and real-time threat intelligence reassured the company: “When something occurs, we reach out to the research team on our shared Slack, and they are on it right away. It feels like an extension of our team.”

Thanks to DataDome, Mansueto Ventures can now focus on its core business with complete peace of mind. “The threats are constantly evolving, and DataDome stays ahead of the curve. Onboarding is quick, dashboards are intuitive, and results are immediate. If you’re considering a bot protection solution, DataDome is a great choice,” says Gerald.