Commission Junction links are registering tons of (probably false) clicks

tux_tina

I have a sidebar of commission junction ads, and they are plain text links (a-tags) with rel="nofollow" attributes in them I'm getting hundreds of "clicks" per day in my daily stats on CJ's dashboard. This seems likely to be wrong, because I have Adsense ads as well, and I usually get < 5 clicks per day from that. Is it possible that webcrawlers are clicking my no-follow ads? how do I go about diagnosing and stopping these false clicks?

Originally asked by Kristian on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

It is very possible that automated robots are crawling your nofollow links. Only a few robots such as Googlebot pay attention to those tags. Other robots ignore them. You can use one of these techniques to block them better: Send them through a redirector that is blocked by robots.txt . More robots obey that than nofollow . Use JavaScript to write the links into the page. Very few robots execute JavaScript.

Full answer by Stephen Ostermiller: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/89910 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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