Identifying crawler clicks

[rasmusbang]

I have a website where i register outbound clicks on some affiliate links. But when crawlers and search engines pass my site i get clicks registered which are not customer clicks.

How can I identify these clicks and not save records of them?

-Rasmus

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Rasmus,

Are you sure these clicks are being caused by crawlers? Usually this kind of tracking is triggered by javascript events and I don't think it would be common for crawlers to be triggering clicks like that (unless you have a different setup?).

[rhutchings]

Agree with Lynn.  Seems odd that a crawler would cause a "click" in this type of model - i have never run across that happening before.  I would think that by adding java or onclick events would take care of the problem.

[Everett]

Rasmus, what makes you think the bots are clicking on these links? Is there something in your log files that suggests spiders are following those links, or are you just getting really low conversion rates from clicks to affiliate programs?

Affiliate links should also be nofollowed, which would make it even less likely that they would be registering as a click from search engine spiders.