A short post on the Google blog about how the company uses log files to ferret out click fraud. Worth noting ….
Google: Patterns in the Click Fraud Cloud
A short post on the Google blog about how the company uses log files to ferret out click fraud. Worth noting …….
Click fraud is an on going problem that needs to be monitored. My problem is that
I do not have any clicks therefore no monitoring is needed.
Google’s recent defending theme was “open social open social open social”, How to outsource protocol design for free? How to crawl other SN data? Social Workgroups working hard for them!
Google’s new theme “Privacy Privacy Privacy”
It is good to see that Google changed their motto. Google previously said, Click fraud is “self-correcting”. Now “Protecting our advertisers against click fraud is a lot like solving a crime”
But, Having a crime platform, defending it by privacy practice is questionable.
There are logged in users, these user clicks are most likely real clicks, fraud clicks are visible. There is Google toolbar, Cookies.. are they using these to detect click fraud? Moreover, Click programs uses botnet, are they tracking botnets? or having partnership with anyone to detect it? Do they outsource click fraud to third party?
their spying applications uses lot of techniques to uniquely identify users and companies all over the world but not their click detecting system…
How many patterns they found? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? One hundred? Or one or two?
clicks fraud happening for many years, why suddenly Google coming forth and telling something? Looks like people (advertisers/pub) started to ask lot of questions!
Would advertisers ever escape from this black hole?
*YAWN* ….
If Google was so sincerely worried about click fraud, you would NOT have waited until SearchEnginesWeb insisted that you remove the entire clickable colored area in the sponsor links – to finally do so
REALLY sophisticated click fraud technology allows for the ‘Spoofing’ of that referral data
Some use various proxies – including online proxies – to cover their click fraud tracks
Some companies act as outsourcees of clicks – meaning they have many different PCs with different resolutions and many different spoofed proxies to cover their tracks
Click fraud is a much bigger problem than Google or Yahoo or MSN are acknowledging.
Those who have had #1 or #2 rankings for reasonably competitive search terms on the organic SERPs and purchased Sponsor links for those SAME terms, can attest to the dramatic difference in traffic as well as the amount of time spent on the site by each visitor.
None of the top search engines really care about click fraud until it becomes an embarrassing controversy. Their Ad departments look only at the revenue that is generated from their PPCs and try to convince their board of directors that their technologies are so profitable.
It is to their advantage to frame their output in the best possible light and get the best ROI until they get ‘outed’.
Then they go into PR mode and make whatever modifications are needed to silence their critics.
Everyone only cares about their individual paycheck; they care nothing about the Advertisers.
This scenario has been played MILLIONS of times in the past!