Anyone Want To See A Link-Clicking Robot On A Web Page?

Get pretty link pro and avoid that mess. Best WP plugin of history.

Google hates cloaking.

Pretty link (free or pro) puts a robots.txt to so google never even sees the link

Bots can actually do a lot more than this.

As most people know, I buy tons of solo ads to build my list.

I've been doing so for about 4 years now. During that time, I obviously bought from vendors who were scammers and using bots.

Unfortunately, that's a part of doing business when you use solo ads for traffic. That is, until you get yourself a list of honest vendors that you can use regularly. However, this takes a long time, and of course, thousands of dollars to test different vendors.

Anyhow, when I first started buying solos, they had bots that could register a click to your page. I'm sure there were more advanced bots, but mostly the ones being used at that time could simply register clicks from different IPs, making it appear as if the vendor has sent you clicks from many different people.

As time passed, these bots got more advanced. Next came the bots that could not only register a click, but opt-in to your squeeze page also. This made it look like the vendor not only sent you good clicks, but clicks that converted very well.

As if that wasn't far enough, there are now bots that are so advanced they can register clicks, opt-in to your page, and EVEN bypass captchas!

The only way to beat this when buying solo traffic is to use double opt-in. This way, if you get a bunch of people who opted in, yet none who confirmed their email address, you can be sure that you got traffic from a bot.

HOWEVER, hardly any marketers who buy solo ads use double opt-in because it lowers conversion rates drastically, even with real subscribers. Many people don't bother to confirm their email addresses and you basically end up losing a subscriber. In fact, I don't even think I know of anyone in the MMO niche who uses double opt-in on their solo buys.

This is EXACTLY what makes marketers like myself and others who buy solo ads VERY vulnerable to bots.

Not to get off topic, but this is why so many people think solo ads suck and cannot achieve a positive ROI with them.

I absolutely HATE bots and the scammers who use them.

Why not just do it the right way? Oh, I forgot... That would require some actual real work!

Great post and video Brent.