Blogs Eye

I updated a couple of WordPress plugins today. One of them – Permalink-Finder – was way overdue. I had been making small changes to it for a year, but had not released the changes. I rewrote it from scratch and now it runs a little better, and it does a better job of handling 404’s. I find that 99% of what it catches are search robots updating their indexes. They don’t seem to learn, though. The same URLs are hit over and over, especially Yandex, and Biudu. I am considering banning these robots, because they are specifically looking for Russian or Chinese content, and they are very dumb. (It could be spam robots stealing their header info. I don’t knows.)

I issued a new release of the Stop-Spammers plugin. It seems stable enough, but there is always the danger of locking out a legit user who looks like a spammer. As a result, the most powerful features are now turned off by default.

One feature is a lot of fun. Instead of displaying a blocking message, I can now send the spammer to another page. I’ve decided to send the spammers to a doublclick page for a Chinese cheap cell phone website. Anybody who spams one of my sites will be redirected to this site. If they buy something, I get a commission. In this way I am spamming spammers. The feature is turned off by default, but someone clicks it and doesn’t change the URL then I get a free ride. About 30,000 people use this plugin so if 100 people make this mistake I will get hundreds of thousands of hits on the cell phone site.

99.9% of comment spammers are robots, so I may not get any sales. Eventually, though, humans will investigate, and maybe they will buy a cheap cell phone. I don’t have high hopes, but I feel that eventually I will make $15 off of a sale as a result of this.

Today is July 16th. I am currently sending about 2,000 clicks a day to the cell phone site just from my websites. At the end of the month, I may have redirected as many as 30,000 clicks to the site. Possibly many many more if users are not careful. We’ll see if any of these clicks were human and if any of them result in a sale. I will update around August 1.

Current Recap:
Total: 518,452 clicks, no sales
7/30: 58,399
7/29: 37,258
7/28: 39,661
7/27: 55,817
7/26: 45,849
7/25: 53,565
7/24: 37,791
7/23: 33,381
7/22: 30,426
7/21: 23,464
7/20: 33,537
7/19: 31,510
7/18: 21,236
7/17: 14,258
7/16: 1,946

7/31/2012
Sunday night, 7/29/2012, I released a new version of the code that effectively turns off the automatic link to the doubleclick url. It checks for the link value and deletes it if it exists and the new version default for the link is empty. I have had a thousand or so downloads to date and I expect about 10,000 or more eventually. I think this will slow the clicks down to nearly nothing. I feel bad about sending doubleclick half a million robot clicks without a single sale.

7/24/2012
No news – steady clicks from 23,000 to 33,000. I am convinced only about 8,000 of these are mine.
I have given up hope of ever making money off of the random spammer who actually sees the click-through page. In the next release I am taking out the default click to doubleclick and leaving it blank. There is no sense in bothering FocalPrice.com or Linkshare with robot clicks.
Clicks by day:
7/16: 1,946
7/17: 14,258
7/18: 21,236
7/19: 31,510
7/20: 33,537
7/21: 23,464
7/22: 30,426
7/23: 33,381

7/19/2012
The 7/18 click count was 63,020. Still no sales. This number will change, though.

7/18/2012
I got a call from Linkshare today to verify my info. I’ve been a Linkshare customer, although not active, for at least 10 years. It must be because of all the clicks that I am sending them.
For the last three days I am averaging 17,000 clicks a day. That comes to half a million hits a month. The report does not show an accurate count of clicks until a day or so later, that is why I thought the click thru rate was lower.
I am wondering if they called because the wanted to verify me before they registered a sale? That would be cool.

Update: 7/17/2012
After two full days of sending spammer clicks, Rakuten/Linkshare (it’s a doublclick link) have recorded 12,000 clicks. I figure that about 8,000 of that is mine, and the rest is with the help of some supporters like Ovidiu in Russia, and an occasional user who did not read the instructions.

At this rate I should send the site about 2 million hits a year. I have 18 active blogs, an MU blog with 26 sites, and a bunch of test blogs. Only a few of them get appreciable traffic, but all get a ton of spammers hitting them.  I wonder how long before I am banned from the affiliate program?

Still no sales, but 12,000 is not many hits when you consider that 99.9% are robots. I am waiting for the robot overlords to check on what their minions are up to, and then maybe I’ll have some sales.