What To Do About the Bots/Fake Clicks Surge in solo ads?

We all been seeing the crazy surge of Bad and fake clicks , Either coming from Dodgy clicks sellers or from Bots hitting certain links online … and many other ways …

I use Clickmagick , so i will refer to it as the filtering and blocking tool in this pot. Block Fake Clicks in solo ads:

Most Solo ads sellers and traffic providers that use Clickmagick Filtering option , Now is called Flag.

Flag – Flagging will send these clicks through your link or rotator as normal, but their clicks counts will be separated from your main stats. You can view these clicks any time by clicking on the number in the FC column.

Clicks from “Abusers” are flagged for 24 hours after their last abusive click. All other types of clicks are flagged indefinitely.

Block – This will block the click from being processed, and the “click” will be sent to a generic error page. You can view blocked clicks on the Public Stats page of any link, or the Shared Stats page of any rotator URL.

So Flagged Clicks are till processed and they are circulating around , till they start getting blocked.

Also Flagged Clicks are counted towards Your Clickmagick plan , and if you have allot of Flagged clicks hitting your account , you are paying for it.

Solution , from within Clickmagick, is pretty Simple and Obvious , if you want to stop those clicks and send your clients Good Clean Clicks , They Should Be Blocked not Flagged … BLOCK THEM ALL !!

# Update 16-01-2020 : Not Blocking Anon is a good idea, because with many people working from home and needing VPN to access certain websites and programs, you could be missing on potetial serious clients, so set Anon to ” nothing”.

Those Bots Are Still Going through your Blocking filters in Clickmagick !

No System is perfect, and clickmagick isn’t far from that! Millions of new Fake clicks, Bots Server Clicks are produced every minute !

So let’s take one more step to block as much as we can from those bad clicks, Bots, Servers …

Block the spamming user-agent in your robots.txt file!

I know, I know, this whole thing quickly spirals into the annoyingly tech-y realm of nerd that most website owners probably want to avoid. But it’s not that Complicated.

In an effort to start controlling fake traffic I  have added the following major spammers to .htaccess file, .htaccess is located in your main site directory.

Open Your .htaccess file and add the following :

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*amazonaws\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} ^.*\.compute-1\.amazonaws\.com$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} ^http://.*amazonaws\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} ^www\.amazonaws\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} “AISearchBot” [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} “woriobot” [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} “heritrix” [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} “NetSeer” [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} “Nutch” [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F]

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from amazonaws.com
Deny from hosting.com
Deny from 72.21.206.80
Deny from 72.21.210.29
Deny from 207.171.166.22
Deny from 67.59.185.59

end code. bye bye bots 🙂

Now if You cant access .htaccess and dont know what to do and where to go … and if You use Word Press, there a pretty nice plug in that will fix that for you.

Install plugin: WP htaccess Control

Click on Custom .htaccess Tab and Paste the Code Provided above.

Click on ” Save all changes” And You are Done !

Now This isn’t going to fix and block all back clicks 100% ! nothing will ever will .. /but combined with clickmagick Blocking, or whatever tracking system you use with this method will block a big number of back clicks.

I hope this quick post helps a little bit cleaning those bad clicks that are going around Now.

UPDATE 27/09/17

Few Updates i have been testing to Block Bad bots and things have been working great so far , So here we go:

As Buddie Howie Johnson mentioned in the previous post, Always Disable ” Archive ” and ” Sharing ” in Aweber if you use Aweber, if you use a different Autoresponder, search or contact support on how to disable Archive.

The reason it’s good to disable archive, it means the emails u send dont get saved and published for the public, as it is a standard option when you are doing a broadcast.

What that means and why it can be no good for you ? it means as long as those links are accessible by anyone online, they can be spammed, clicked by bots, by crawlers .. extra … Some of those Bots, Crawler and clickers could be bad and they can do allot of harm to you.

Here’s How to Disable Archive Broadcasts in Aweber:

Make Sure You Click Edit and Disable the Archive option:

Also Another recommended step to do , is when you are doing a link in the email body , attribute ” no follow” with it, like this :

• Add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag.

Because the second way is more time-consuming and technical than it’s worth, here’s how to add a NoFollow tag to your paid links.

1. Add a link to your text the way you normally would.

   The link will look like this:

   <a href="http://www.SponsorSite.com">My Sponsor Text</a>

2. Insert the NoFollow tag by editing the link as follows:

   <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.example.com">My Sponsor Link</a>

Now One last recommendation that i have tested and it’s been working okay is a word press free plug in , i tested so many and most of them dont work properly or cause WP issues, this one is light and easy and it has a table of thousands of bad bots (2,815 items).

Installing the “Stop Bad Bots” can be done:

a) Through WordPress Dashboard

By searching for “Stop Bad Bots” via the “Plugins > Add New” screen in your WordPress dashboard;

Activate :

okay , that’s it for now Guys , i hope this helps a bit more to make sure we all run a free bad bots and bad clicks businesses 🙂

Happy Blocking !!

Please share and spread the word …

Cheers,

Mark

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