***Admin Edit: Josh has re-posted this as well as added to it on his own blog over at Full Speed SEO. Check it out***

Jack has been kind enough to let me post this on his blog, and I thank him for being a gracious host for my obnoxious writing.

Yesterday, I found myself excited as I saw my EPN clicks shoot past 50, then past 100, then less excited after 200, and absolutely livid after 400. I was getting scraped and they were following all of my EPN links driving my once very respectable EPC right through the floor. I made a hearty $4.00US yesterday because some stupid idiot wanted to scrape my scraped content. Here is the solution I came up with if you use Auction2Post: Javascript. We’re going to use a sneaky little piece of script to keep bots from finding our EPN links.

Step 1: Log into your WordPress Admin, and go to your Auction2Post settings and hit “Templates”

Step 2: Make a copy of your A2PDefaultTemplate to edit.

Step 3: Go to your EPN panel and go to the link generator and make a link for a specific Item in your specific campaign. I like to break everything up into campaigns so I know when one of my sites is tanking.

You’ll end up with a link that looks like

Step 4: Now, back in your template you’re going to want to use the template tag to get the Item number. Throw in a little javascript magic and you have:

<script type="text/javascript">
var item = "[itemID]";
var first = "http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-xxxxx-xxxxx-0/1?icep_ff3=2&pub=xxxxxxxxxx&toolid=10001&campid=xxxxxxxxxxx&customid=&icep_item=";
var last = "&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=xxxxxxxx&kwid=xxxxxxx&mtid=824&kw=lg";
var url = first+item+last;
document.write("<a href=\"",decodeURI(url),"\">Click HERE TO BUY</a>");
</script>

Add this to your template where you’d otherwise have regular links.

So what kind of protection does this afford us? Let’s see.

• The url is never in complete form, so we don’t have to worry about regex matches.
• The URL doesn’t live in the <A> tag, so we don’t have to worry about scraping there.
• The url isn’t put together until the user clicks. Bonus.

Hopefully this will help against the most common bots running around ruining our days.

Joshua Ziering is owner of FullSpeedSEO and loves to talk about all kinds of nerdy stuff. You can see his personal blog @ myauntishot.com