Publisher Click Fraud And Viagra

Yep you read right! Click fraud and Viagra is the title of this post. What do the two have together other than keeping a lot of people up at night? “Buy Viagra” is one of the hottest keywords as far as Google AdSense money goes. A site hosting Viagra ads can rake in $10 to $35 per click through Google AdSense. While this post is talking about click fraud, you should know that Viagra type keywords are used by a lot of professionals to gauge Google organic SERP’s.

It is also going to serve as one of the examples I will be using to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Google’s SPAM filters, how their SERP’s are being watered down and spoofed by spammers and how black hat webmasters are raking in a fortune through click fraud.

This is an important concept to understand: how legitimate websites are getting beaten out of hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars a day by publisher click fraud. There are two different types of ads from Google that have two different types of clients:

1. Google AdWords – These are ads and keywords that companies buy and bid on. They are mostly text links that appear within Google, but also can appear on other sites through AdSense. People that purchase Google AdWords keyword text ads are advertisers.
2. Google AdSense – These are advertiser’s keyword text ads that appear on sites other than Google. People that put Google ads on their sites are called publishers. When advertisers bid on keywords, the top 4 or 5 will be spread out to the sites within Google’s AdSense network that have enough keywords to qualify for those ads. This is where the most damaging and least talked about type of click fraud takes place. Our example today about Viagra and the doorway and ad-only sites is just one of the big money industries that is getting hammered with click fraud.

I am not going to give scumbags the blueprint on how to both spoof Google into placing ads that are not relevant to the site, nor am I going to explain in great detail the simple technology I used to make fraudulent clicks on my own account.

Before I dig in, my post on how PPC Is Ruining The Internet yielded a comment from Neil at Fraudulent Clicks a site that deals with click fraud and has some good info on how to identify it. He had stated that “AdWords suppliers can spot content network fraud quite easily”, a bold statement indeed. I unfortunately disagree, and decided to run a couple of tests to prove that I could wrack up a slew of clicks and have it appear to the advertiser as normal traffic. I have both a Google AdWords account and a separate Google AdSense account which is how I was able to prove that click fraud in NOT easily detected.

The search world often gauges terms related to Viagra due to its popularity in worldwide searches as well as the high price that it brings to publishers. If you want to know anymore about this take a look at one of my friends’ site Syndk8 which is running a test on “buy viagra” SERP’s. (And yes I just participated in that test by putting in the link : ))

How Publisher Click Fraud Is A Million Dollar Industry

Now that everyone understands what publisher click fraud is, I am going to briefly tell you what I did. I put some money into my AdWords account and bid on some low-cost keywords about data backup and put up a one-page wonder sub domain site called crash recovery systems and used some scripts I downloaded off the Internet that allowed me to put 6 Google Ad boxes along with bogus text about disaster recovery I blatantly scraped from another site.

That is the first part of publisher click fraud. Taking a webpage and putting on more than 2 allowed ad units and spoofing the AdWords server into serving high cost text ads that have nothing to do with the domain. These are in direct conflict with Google’s Terms and Conditions:

Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful information about the product or service in your ad. For instance, direct users to the page where they can buy the advertised product, rather than to a page with a description of several products.
Originality:

Feature unique content that can’t be found on another site.
Provide substantial information. If your ad does link to a page consisting mostly of ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional, unique content.

At this time I have taken the site down just in case someone rats on me and gets my account disabled, but I captured the screen with Camtasia so I could put up a video later on showing the site and ad units it served.

The next thing I did was go onto my Kubuntu machine and loaded Ice Weasel (this is another name for FireFox) that uses a proxy server that utilizes .edu domains. I went to the site and clicked on MY ad. I then quickly chose another server in the list, refreshed my browser, cleared the cookies and went back to the site and clicked the ad again. The whole process took less than a minute.

I did this a few times then went into my AdSense account ad saw that I had made $16.00 at 12 cents per click on the text clicks and 19 cents by using the search box and clicking on my ad in the SERP’s. In fact the search AdSense is even easier to spoof because you are going through yet another interface. By setting up multiple entry points I could have done this all day long and wracked up a hundred or so dollars on a 12 cent click. This can be done to the extreme on personal injury lawyers sites, Viagra and pharmaceutical sites to bring in even more profit.

Now I know my detractors are going to say that advertisers will recognize sites that don’t convert leads or have an inordinate amount of clicks, but a good webmaster knows how to cloak sites and could easily build 10 or 20 doorway pages on different sub domains, hide them and make calls to the ads through proxies and even simulate interest traffic. Interest traffic is a site visitor that looks at more than 2.5 pages in at least 2 minutes of surfing. I was easily able to simulate interest in the site by clicking on links filling out forms. When you are getting a few dollars per click it doesn’t take a genius to know that faking interest on a site can easily spoof the fraud filters.

When I went back into my AdWords account and looked at the analytics, there really wasn’t any apparent click fraud, the traffic looked normal and so did the behavior. Publishers that do this will have multiple sites and many ways to simulate legitimate traffic.

There is only one way to eliminate publisher click fraud. Google MUST remove doorway and ad-only sites. Going back to the Viagra example, a search for “Viagra” yields these results:

The two red arrows are 2 ad-only sites that are in the top 10 of Google for a major search! Look at the web.archive content. It is total nonsense! How can this be? Google needs to focus on getting spam and publisher fraud sites out of the index. Rather than declaring war on paid links, Google should be cleaning up its act.

Why PPC Is Ruining The Web

Everywhere you go on the web you see pay per click ads. They are cluttering up pages and overshadowing the content you are trying to find. It used to be flashy banner ads that were the bane of the Internet, now Google Ads are taking up valuable web properties and making it harder for users to find what they are looking for. Text ad boxes can fill up to 30% of the screen real estate on some sites, and in a lot of cases they are appearing at the top of content pages and therefore BECOMING the content. The ads are what crafty webmasters are now using as the point to which their traffic is driven to.

This is the exact opposite of what search engines like Google preach, yet they are one of the biggest purveyors of text ad boxes with their AdSense program. It is not just the cluttering, the cost per click is being driven up by ad-only sites and are often denizens of click-fraud. Advanced practices like online proxy servers and cookie flushing plugins give AdSense site owners the ability to click on their own ads anonymously. This type of action and fraud is not easily apparent to Google since browsers like FireFox make it easy for users to hide their IP and online identity.

Pay Per Click Problems On The Internet

The major issues that involve pay per click can be broken down into two categories:

1. Usability Problems - these issues revolve around how PPC ads are cluttering sites and making it harder for users to find answers. The usability problems are looked at from a user standpoint.
2. Advertiser Problems - these issues are with the ads themselves. Click fraud, over priced keywords and low conversion rates are covered here.

Pay Per Click Usability Problems

We have already talked about how these ads are cluttering up sites and are making it difficult to find legitimate content. Sites that are ad-only are slowly taking over placement from legitimate, content oriented sites. The more that sites fill up their spaces with text ad boxes, the less real content can take the limelight.

A content oriented website must follow website usability rules to be successful. By putting AdSense ads in prevalent positions, a greedy webmaster is making it harder for users to navigate and find the products and services that they are looking for. Real content is being confused with paid ads. These types of sites are looking for quick money, not return visitors. The only way to stop this is to leave these sites when you come upon them. They are parasites and make honest hard working legitimate webmasters spend more time and money than we should. They are in direct conflict with Google’s policies, yet Google does nothing about it. It is up to us to not give them any credence by NOT CLICKING ON PAID ADS!

Advertiser PPC Problems

People that spend money on pay per click ads are not getting the return on investment (ROI) that they did just a couple of years ago. The reasons for this are many. The more experienced a web user is, the less likely they are to click on sponsored or paid results in the SERP’s. They are even less likely to click on them on other sites that use AdSense. That leaves less experienced users who are much less likely to convert into a lead or a sale and click fraud.

Click fraud is a huge problem for both publishers and advertisers. In case you don’t know the difference, an advertiser is a website that buys paid ads, a publisher is the site on which the paid ad is hosted on. Both parties can be victims to click fraud. Advertisers can have their ads clicked on by their competitors who want to drive them out of the bidding or just want to cost the advertiser money. This is the type of click fraud that is more well known. Google spends millions in click fraud reimbursement when advertisers can bring them proof that their ads have been clicked on in a fraudulent manner. The thing is, Google doesn’t reimburse money, they just give credit to the advertisers account, so the cycle just begins again.

The more prevalent and often less discussed type of click fraud comes from the publisher. Sites that are ad-only are more likely to click on their own ads and cost advertisers money. Google has a very hard time tracking this type of fraud thanks to the privacy technology that exists. I can spoof anybody using FireFox. A site or Google will have no idea what my IP is, what OS I am using or even where I am geographically. I am not a hacker and don’t know anything about programming, but I can hide my identity. These ad-only sites that live on click fraud have many resources available to them. There are keyword sites and services that you can buy that will give you a list of the highest paid keyword clicks on the Internet. They get updated daily.

When you see sites that are sub domains with no relevance to the keyword phrase, more than likely they are a fraud. An example would be: new-york-injury-attourney.somethingalltogetherdifferent.con. These sites will have little content, just enough to spoof the Google AdWords server enough to show ads for injury lawyers in new York City. Keywords having to do with personal injury are good for $25 to $50 a click in LA and New York.

If you run across these types of sites, don’t click on their links, leave! If you are an advertiser, research your keywords in Google and make a list of bogus ad-only sites. You can add them to the filter in AdWords. Be wary of any click charges that come outside of the true SERP’s. Make claims to Google when your traffic is not converting or if your analytics don’t match up to the clicks.

The only way we can do anything about this is to not go on ad-only sites. If they don’t make money, they will eventually go away. Maybe someday Google will adhere to their own policies and declare war on spam sites and ad-only pages.