Google sued for click fraud

[gehrlekrona]

Found this article: http://www.thehostingnews.com/article1876.html where a hosting company has sued Google for Click fraud.
Interesting article that might affect all Google publishers.

Google keep declining my application for an adsence account. The funny thing is they allow it first, then when i have about £100 accumulated i get this funny email "Hello raj ahluwalia, Your AdSense account was found to be related to an account previously disabled for invalid click activity and we have therefore disabled your we have therefore disabled your account.

I dont know how google come to this conclusion. I have talked to my flat mates( we all share one broadband0 and beleive google may be holding data against the common IP address. Is this legal under the data protection act 1998 ? The tale thickens , one of the room mates applied from the same broadband and he was accepted. Know i leave it for you to decide what is going on but check this out

John Smith - Accepted

Raj Walia - continously rejected

I beleive not all is OK at google UK. I just beleive for ethical reasons people should not advertise with google any more
Good Luck

[gehrlekrona]

To me it seems that someone from that broadband connection has been clicking on your ads and you can not do that
It seems that Google keeps track of your IP address somehow because when I click on my ads they get counted but you don't get paid for them, whic is probably right otherwise everybody would do that to make money. The only reason I click on my ads is when I fond either something that interestes me or find a competitor and want to check out what they are doing so I really don't care if I get paid or not for clicking, BUT somehow Google knows that it is me that is clicking on the ads!! So, do they keep track of my IP when I sign up/log in to my account and then when I click on an ad it cross checks the IP's????? Nor sure how they do it, but they know who you are

[aaayoureweb]

Google banned my website after having them for a year with adsense, said My website was recieving invalid clicks and this was 2 months after offering my visitors my EffectiveBrand SEORX Webmaster toolbar. I asked google how they can tell, becouse I sure not was clicking on my own ads. They replied back, they have a system of determining where the clicks came from and they said it was a software program. They wont even index my website anymore....All money will be refunded back to their advertisers. So I contacted one of their advertisers and told them what happened and if they recieved any compansation back. I used google analytics on my webpages to determine what keywords where mostly clicked on. this advertiser said in their website logs they can see that I sent them quite a bit of traffic. So Google did not reinburse them as well as held all my earnings, so i switched to yahoo ads for the past 3 months and have not had a problem since. Oh, and one ,more thing, I wanted to see if google would let me advertise with them for some keywords and sure enough they were glad too take my money. But still refuse to index my website or further join their adwords for publisher program. i still generate quite a bit of traffic from yahoo and msn, but not anymore from aol search since they partnered with google search results..

[gehrlekrona]

I create a web site around a subject I am eally interested in. I tell all my friends about it and I visit my site every day because there are some news feeds or something that interests me. When I am visiting the site I see some advertising that I really would like visit and buy BUT I can't do that because I may be accused of click fraud, so the advertiser just lost a customer.
I guess I can either go to Google and search and see if I find the same advertiser again (and Google makes more money that way because first of all they don't have to share with anybody for the click and secondly clicks on SERP's pay better) or go to a competitors sote and try to find the ad OR copy the shortcut, paste it in my browser. If I do the latter, the advertiser pays for the click and I get to their site but is that click fraud too??
I can understand that you shouldn't sit there and click on your ads just to make money but a couple of clicks now and then because you are interested in something shouldn't matter.
If you need to get listed again I might be able to help. Email me and we can discuss

Click Fraud is indeed a big mess. It's a big problem to which there is no easy solution.

[adsenseless]

gehrlekrona wrote:

I create a web site around a subject I am eally interested in. I tell all my friends about it and I visit my site every day because there are some news feeds or something that interests me. When I am visiting the site I see some advertising that I really would like visit and buy BUT I can't do that because I may be accused of click fraud, so the advertiser just lost a customer.
I guess I can either go to Google and search and see if I find the same advertiser again (and Google makes more money that way because first of all they don't have to share with anybody for the click and secondly clicks on SERP's pay better) or go to a competitors sote and try to find the ad OR copy the shortcut, paste it in my browser. If I do the latter, the advertiser pays for the click and I get to their site but is that click fraud too??
I can understand that you shouldn't sit there and click on your ads just to make money but a couple of clicks now and then because you are interested in something shouldn't matter.
If you need to get listed again I might be able to help. Email me and we can discuss

you are so right! i am one of those who have faced this problem before. in fact i've been axed from adsense twice now, all becoz of one or two harmless clicks on some ads that attracted my attention. i visit my own site every day, as i pump in a lot of news from various feed sources... becoz of this, adsense keeps coming up with lots of very relevant ads (kudos to G for a great job), and some of my clicks were genuinely out of curiosity to find out more about the advertiser. is there any way my account can be revived?

[gehrlekrona]

but they do keep track of who you are, where you login from and all that neat stuff so I never click on my ads.
Another thing I discovered the other day is if you work for a big company like I do then we all have the same IP address when we go to Google and to my web site(s) so if anybody from my company clicks Google might think it is me clicking......

[adsenseless]

do u think they tag us by our MAC address? i use a company-provided laptop everywhere i go. i may visit my own site using several different IPs at different locations, but if they were to really track us by our MAC address, then there is no running away... unless i spoof my MAC addr...

[doodles]

Yeah.. I guess they must log your MAC address. I can't see how else they would be able to track you

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Yeah.. I guess they must log your MAC address. I can't see how else they would be able to track you

MAC adress is not send along with a normal browser http request, so they are no using that. If yoy are tracked across multiple IPs it's most likely just cookie based.

[doodles]

Well, that's easy enough for people just to delete their cookies when using a different IP.. Why not steal from the thieves anyway!!

[Papadoc]

Originally Posted by doodles

Well, that's easy enough for people just to delete their cookies when using a different IP.. Why not steal from the thieves anyway!!

The "thieves" you are talking about are the paying merchants, mostly small business people. These are the people that pay the bills. As for the first statement, keep putting that thought out there. It draws the idiots out into the open where Google can cut them off at the knees.

[gehrlekrona]

that Google REALLY should do is to check what sites their ads are on. I am pretty sure that sites just created for Google ads are the ones that has the most click frauds around. There are probably other ways of click fraud where you don't even need a web site to click on ads but if Google checked out the sites and disabled the accounts for site with little or no content except for Google ads I thkn the click fraud would go down, and so would Googles income, so I am guessing that their interest in taking care of click fraud is kinda limited except for the ones that really stick out like a sore thumb.
Oh BTW, Davs Mikkel Jag sag att du kommer fran Kopenhamn

[doodles]

Originally Posted by Papadoc

The "thieves" you are talking about are the paying merchants, mostly small business people. These are the people that pay the bills. As for the first statement, keep putting that thought out there. It draws the idiots out into the open where Google can cut them off at the knees.

OK, Papadoc.. whatever you say. The "thieves" I was talking about were Google, and I draw your attention to the sorts of prices they actually charge for their ads. A bunch of f***ing capitalist wankers would be a more appropriate term for them, perhaps..

[adsenseless]

i've detected some IP addresses to my site which i think are bots crawling over my site. do bots actually contribute to clicks on my adsense ads?

[ganeshjacharya]

Originally Posted by adsenseless

gehrlekrona wrote:


you are so right! i am one of those who have faced this problem before. in fact i've been axed from adsense twice now, all becoz of one or two harmless clicks on some ads that attracted my attention. i visit my own site every day, as i pump in a lot of news from various feed sources... becoz of this, adsense keeps coming up with lots of very relevant ads (kudos to G for a great job), and some of my clicks were genuinely out of curiosity to find out more about the advertiser. is there any way my account can be revived?

Hey you can do this...... right click on the links you are curious about clicking and then copy the URL , then paste that in a notepad like this

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com...09360493706152

strip the above URL of all the google code

http://superhitcd.com&client=ca-pub-2709360493706152

I bet this is the enthical way to do things. Why waste someone's hard earned money? What would you do if someone burns your hard earned money? I would feel bad if someone does fraud with my adword ads.

will google frown upon adsense ready sites??? I purchased a pack at adsensemap.com and seems good but Im worried google frowns upon them- ?? So far i hear it's all good and they don't care but before I put up 150 websites i would sure like to be sure!! haha

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

before I put up 150 websites i would sure like to be sure!!

If you want to be sure about anything you should look for another type of business. In search, nothing is for sure

[highpr]

Here's another similar incident - where a colocation company is conducting a 12 month study into click fraud. Here's an excerpt:


CEO of Hosting.com offered, ''Being a victim of click fraud ourselves as well as our clients, we began to study the issue a few years ago. We have applied our tremendous knowledge and expertise regarding Internet infrastructure and networking, security, and web user behavior to develop a sophisticated data collection system that will assist us greatly in our analysis of this problem, and assist our thousands of clients who spend significantly on PPC advertising.''

Click here to read the entire PPC Click Fraud Story.