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That still won't detect bots. If you build a click-bot, you're probably only going to click the link and download the source. You wouldn't care about loading any images so the 1x1 pixel image still won't track the page load.

To track bots effectively, you need to check your server logs. In fact, you could build a strong case for a bot click if the requesting IP pulled the source HTML but didn't follow up with any image requests from the page. Not loading images is typical bot behavior.

Yes that would definitely tell him that people without JS turned on were viewing his page. It would not magically tell him that these came from facebook (or should have).

"wrap an image call in a noscript tag"

Although the author of the original post said nothing, i assume that's what they did.

You can also just look at the server logs. That's what most of us did before Google Analytics (and still do).