Got a site, Vintage Art Prints Posters, that was expiring and was a PR3. Took it live tonight. This week I got hammered by bots. I think I had about 1500 extra clicks every day over 3 campaigns. This killed those campaigns and eBay stopped paying me on them. Just yesterday I got the problem resolved after almost 5 or 6 days of getting hammered.
I did report it to eBay and they said they forwarded it to the appropriate person. What that means I don’t know but I figured if I want the bots to stop I am going to have to stop them. So to do this I wrote a redirect 301 script that logs all referrers and IP addresses going to eBay. This way I can easily spot the bad referrer or IP address and quickly block it in the script. I also am not sending any traffic if it is not referred from my domain. This way a bot cannot cache the page somewhere and hit the links directly later.
EPN filters many bots for us, but not all. These bad bots are bad news and all people using EPN should have some plan of action in place to prevent what happened with me. I was sitting pretty with an EPC of about .10 and in 5 or 6 days because of these bots I am sitting at about .02. Overall my earnings did not tank completely since my other campaigns carried me. This only hit 3 of my campaigns/sites hard. I started changing all my old sites over to use my redirect script. Maybe when I have more time I will share the script if anyone would like to see it.
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I personally don’t feel bots should be our responsibility. I wish ebay would have stuck with their previous setup because I was getting tons of new sign ups at $28 a pop and now I get .01 a click… what a waste of time.
Then when my sites do amazing traffic wise it goes to zero AND they are NOT bot clicks but actual search engine traffic.
I dig what you have going on here, can’t wait to see how you progress. A suggestion though, all the older posts with expired domains odds are they are not helping seo wise. As in within the archives and so forth.
I wish I could pull what you are, how many sites are you working with? I had one solid site making $400+ a month on its own PRE “quality click” and now it is doing $13, I am not happy at all lol.
I agree Don. EPN is horrible at bot filtering. I would be making more on the old system as well. Although for me it is almost break even so I am not as upset.
Check out my latest post it tells you how many sites I currently have running. I agree about the old posts I have around here. I am not majorly concerned about it though. This site is not really making me any money anyways.
Good luck getting back on track with QPC. Don’t give up there is money to be made. Just adjust what you are doing until EPN gets it figured out on their end.