Last month: 166 Clicks / 51 Uniques / ZERO DAMN SALES! This month: 28813 Clicks / 15182 Uniques / ZERO DAMN SALES! I have an Amazon AWS site. The Google bot is killing my reporting. At first I was optimistic. Then I thought I had an abandonment issue. Now I KNOW it is googlebot. Does anyone have a htaccess rewrite to stop googlebot from clicking on amazon.com links within your site? Much appreciation and rep for your help!
I don't know if Amazon allows redirecting (do they?). If it does, you could do a php redirect and block googlebot in robots.txt I don't think rel="nofollow" helps in this particular case, because I think googlebot really follows the nofollow, but it just doesn't give away link juice.
i have had a bot messing up my sites a bit. Has a P.O.Box number in mountain view but is not google. From ip range 65 208 151 112 to 119 does not even look at robots txt and follows "jump" type scrip links etc owned by Kintiskton LLC who ever they are. A quick google search shows many other sites having problems with them as well, and some thought it was google.
There are LOTS of bots out there causing trouble -are you SURE it's GoogleBot? I am actually pretty sure that Amazon's stats filter out the GoogleBot, otherwise we would all have massive amounts of clicks like you. I had some "PanScient" bot caning my site the other day, using up my valuable API calls - no value whatsoever to my site, needs blocking. I did a robots.txt like this (partly borrowed from somewhere): # Googlebots, msnbots, yahoo, and Ask User-agent: googlebot User-agent: msnbot/ User-agent: searchpreview User-agent: slurp User-agent: Teoma User-agent: yahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2 # DMOZ/ODP, Verizon, girafa page thumbnailer, Internet Archiver User-agent: Robozilla User-agent: Verizon Superpages Web Crawler User-agent: girafa User-agent: ia_archiver disallow: # disallow all others User-agent: * disallow: / Code (markup): ...allowing ONLY the bots in the first section into your site at all - can't see the point in allowing ANY others (though maybe I missed some other amazing search engine that sends loads of traffic). Yes, I know this only catches the "good" bots, but then there are plenty of "good" bots wasting bandwidth and racking up clicks, so it's a start. If the problem persists then you have to see what other culprits there may be and start blocking at the .htaccess level... A "rel='external,nofollow'" in your header might help too...