Best way to prevent bots from following links

anything better than redirect.xyz exluded in robots.txt

[Bernie]

If I'd like to make sure no bot is following links my (maybe a little simple) solution would be:

- use a redirect-file like red.cgi
- put it in some folder like domain.com/admin/red.cgi
- exlude folder /admin/ in robots.txt

Question is if this wouldn't draw any unappreciated attention...

Would you use anything more sophisticated?

[mcavic]

Do you mean legitimate bots, or spambots? For legitimate bots, the robots.txt should work, or meta robots nofollow.

For spambots, I'd try javascript links. No guarantees, though. Some of them will pull out anything that looks like a url.

[Bernie]

>> legitimate bots

yes.