How do I make tweets show destination image preview? - or how to remove bot traffic while stil direct linking?

[MartinRaymond1999]

I am not talking about making a clickable image tweet using the 'cards' function I have read about before.

I am wanting to promote a commission junction advertiser. Their shop has many items and I want to post rotating links to individual items on their site but wait! It isn't so simple as just pasting the link into twitter. I also want to redirect through my own domain to get rid of twitters inflated bot traffic by using a javascript redirect so the bot will not go through or otherwise somehow remove the bot traffc.

So how can I do it so there will be image previews still for each offer and still getting rid of the bot traffic?

I am thinking I will have to save all the images from the pages I want to promote onto my own hosting and use that as the image src but I tried it so far and the image preview doesn't show on twitter still when I post a link to my own domain even though the image is there too. It just shows a bare link with no preview. Also it would be a lot of work to do this for each and every one.

Is there another way to direct link while still being able to get rid of the annoying bot traffic? You might say it isn't important to get rid of bot traffic but to me it is. It is really a nuisance for tracking your progress as results are wildly inaccurate so you don't know what you are doing is effective or not and so many false positives when the bot traffic is flowing through all the time.

 

[HoNeYBiRD]

If you don't want bot traffic to show up in your stats, you need to block Twitter crawlers and that you can do via robots.txt by blocking the Twitterbot user-agent. At the same time you can allow it to access certain directories such as "images". This is supposed to be how image previews show up, while you can filter bot traffic: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/cards/guides/getting-started#crawling

If the image previews don't show up, you might try these troubleshooting tips for cards to the same analogy: https://developer.twitter.com/en/do...es/cards/guides/troubleshooting-cards#siteSSl

But if you don't succeed, in analytics it's easy to spot bot traffic, so that shouldn't interfere with real traffic.

 

[MartinRaymond1999]

If you don't want bot traffic to show up in your stats, you need to block Twitter crawlers and that you can do via robots.txt by blocking the Twitterbot user-agent. At the same time you can allow it to access certain directories such as "images". This is supposed to be how image previews show up, while you can filter bot traffic: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/cards/guides/getting-started#crawling

If the image previews don't show up, you might try these troubleshooting tips for cards to the same analogy: https://developer.twitter.com/en/do...es/cards/guides/troubleshooting-cards#siteSSl

But if you don't succeed, in analytics it's easy to spot bot traffic, so that shouldn't interfere with real traffic.

Ye but the advertiser's site isn't my own so not a case of blocking robots, well I can on the redirect domain but that has just the same effect as a js redirect since the bot cannot follow through a js redirect since it doesn't use js.

I played around with different links and see now I can get the preview to show when direct linking, I just have to figure out what code triggers it, and maybe somehow how 'serve up' only that code on my intermediate domain.

 

[MartinRaymond1999]

...

EDIT: ok I got it now thanks. The card stuff is what it was. I have just taken the whole page from the destination url (which has the cards meta tags) and put on my domain and can now see the card in twitter. So I will just remove the unnecessary stuff til only the essentials are left.