I changed my shop page yesterday so I would get emailed when someone clicked to buy a handbag. The email has all the user's public info in it, like IP address. I thought that would help me figure out what was going on. And it did!
Yahoo's spider was buying my purses! And probably GoogleBot, too. Search engines send out
spiders/robots/crawlers to index web pages so they show up in searches. When a spider would come to my shop page, it would follow the Buy Now links which 'purchased' my handbags.
The way to prevent this is to put a
robot meta tag in the head of my webpage. In that tag, I can tell spiders not to follow the links on this particular page. It should work ... if it doesn't, I'll let you know.
[photo taken 7/14/2007 in Philadelphia]
A bird eating a bug is the closest I could find to a spider. I need to have Andrew take some spider pictures for me. I'm sure they'd come in handy. Click on the image to see some more of his crazy-cute photos of sparrows. The one right after this one makes me choke, it's so f-ing adorable.