Les Jones

E-commerce > Joel Sposky on Google AdSense Click Fraud

Something Rotten in AdSense:

When you connect the dots, what seems to be happening is that scammers are doing four things.

1. First, they create a lot of fake blogs. There are slimy companies that make easy to use software to do this for you. They scrape bits and pieces of legitimate blogs and repost them, as if they were just another link blog. It is very hard to tell the difference between a fake blog and a real blog until you read it for a while and realize there's no human brain behind it, like one of those Jack Format radio stations that fired all their DJs, or maybe FEMA.
2. Then, they sign up for AdSense.
3. Then you buy or rent a network of zombie PCs (that is, home computers that are attached to the Internet permanently which have been infected by a virus allowing them to be controlled remotely).
4. Finally, use those zombie PCs to simulate clicks on the links on your blog. Because the zombie PCs are all over the Internet, they appear to be legit links coming from all over the Internet.

I buy advertising on Google's AdWords for my company. AdWords allows you to control whether your ads are displayed in Google's own search results, in syndicated search results, or in syndicated content (which is the AdSense side of the business). I don't allow any of our ads to go to syndicated content sites. In part that's because the products we sell are too expensive for an impulse purchase ("A $10,000 firewall? Sounds like fun. I'll take two!"), but also because of click fraud.

To keep your AdWords off of AdSense, log into AdWords, go into each campaign, then click Edit Campaign Settings and uncheck Content Network.