Twitter @ msgs dead?

I'm talking about doing a bunch of @username updates on twiter. Was there ever any merit to this method anyway? Here's my journey:
I just did that stuff for fun and suddenly I got hundreds of clicks to some crappy clickbank product, got my twit accounts suspended, tweaked the scripts a bit, used diffrent urls, but nothing seemed to work as good as it did the first time.
Then someday I got about 800 clicks in a couple of hours, HOLY CRAP! I did it with about 10 accounts and a few seconds delay (after each request). Funny thing: these accounts were not suspended, but after a few hours they didn't generate a single click no matter what I did.
So, I make a new batch of accounts, 200 clicks, then nothing. But wait for the stunning conclusion. I went to check the access logs and almost none of that traffic were actual visitors, all some strange bots and weird user agents. Some looked legit, but hardly worth the mention.
So what's going on? Some random sites picking up your url just because they see it mentioned every few seconds? Twitter quietly suppressing @ messages?

P.S. I was kindly pushing some weight loss stuff to Oprah's followers. I thought to myself, they're fat AND stupid, this is gonna be perfect Anyways, I managed to get 4 order form impressions and 1 order form submit per about 2k hop counts. Is this normal? I'm sure it's not but tell me anyway.

tldr: :twak: <-here's a turtle. If none of you will respond to this, I forgive you.

 

Sounds like you happened to do an @username to someone who was a trending topic.

 

what???

 

It would seem, but the only pattern I got was new accounts and a new url. Might have been just a damn coincidence.
Do you think this could be worth anything?

 

It's actually pretty standard for there to be hundreds of bot clicks when you post a link on Twitter that winds up in search. There are all kinds of bots - secutiry/antivirus companies, search companies, etc are all running Twitter bots. My personal belief is that Twitter is now even running bots that look at the ultimate destination of all links posted and ties together spam accounts this way. They may also be working with bit.ly to give them this info, since they are the "official" URL shortener of twitter.

It's just part of Twitter marketing. Your click counts will be VERY artificially inflated by bot traffic. The bot traffic tends to drop off within an hour or so of first appearing in search, but so does the human traffic . Just filter them out of your stats. Here are just some of the bots that visited one of my sites from Twitter in the last 3 hours:

Googlebot
Yahoo! Slurp
Cuil Robot
FAST Crawler
GingerCrawler/1.0 (Language Assistant for Dyslexics; http://www.gingersoftware.com/crawler_agent.htm; support at ginger software dot com)
MSN Robot
Yandex Robot
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Exabot/3.0; http://www.exabot.com/go/robot)
Baidu Spider
Alexa Robot
Sogou Spider
Yahoo! Image Crawler
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Exabot/3.0 (BiggerBetter); http://www.exabot.com/go/robot)
AskJeeves Robot
SurveyBot
Perl LWP
Sosospider
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/, [email protected])
ScoutJet
KaloogaBot
MJ12bot
Netcraft Spider
Entireweb Robot
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1; aggregator:Spinn3r (Spinn3r 3.1); http://spinn3r.com/robot) Gecko/20021130
Discobot
Snapbot
Larbin
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; 008/0.83; http://www.80legs.com/spider.html;) Gecko/2008032620
Sogou-Test-Spider/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)
Google Feedfetcher
SimilarPages/Nutch-1.0-dev (SimilarPages Nutch Crawler; http://www.similarpages.com; [email protected])
robotgenius (http://robotgenius.net)
mmonitor/Nutch-1.0 (MarkMonitor Robots; http://www.markmonitor.com; [email protected])
kindsight/Nutch-1.0 (kscrawler; http://www.projectrialto.com; [email protected])
Sogou develop spider/4.0( http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)
MSIE Crawler
MSR-ISRCCrawler
Yetibot
Picsearch Robot
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) NXS-Crawler-09
YahooSeeker

 

Someone who agrees with me