Here is a case for "the spider" ;-)

Seems like a bot but then the referral url ...?

[caspita]

I have a clasic bot trap in my web site, it is just a hidden link to a folder which is forbiden via robots.txt, every time I get a hit on that page I get an email and and after a limit that I have set is reached the IPs get banned until further investigation. I'm also running a AW PPC campain to get traffic to my web site and I'm using a redirect so I can get some statistics for the referrals from the PPC campain.

Today I got one of these emails from my bot trap, when I was checking the URLs I noticed that the first hit came with a referral from the AW PPC campain, it didn't came from GG SERPS but from a big partner I can say.

Entering the query in my browser I can see that the partner is displaying my Ad.

How come a click coming from that big partner would reach my hidden link? is this something about the browser pre-fetching pages which are linked directly from the landing page or so?

Or is this a real click bot going around, clicking and visiting some extra pages to make GG think that it was a real user?

I just want to know if someone else has get into the same scenario and if it is worth for a single click make GG aware of what just happened, I got charged by the click, that is a fact.

Thanks.

[Section_8]

It could be a prefetch. Do you record the ip's or anything for other pages? Because that could tell you instantly IF it is a prefetch or not. If the same info pops up for every page at the same time, including your "mock" page. Then it's a prefetch. If it's just a physical click from one source on your "mock" page, then it smells like a click bot...