What if i like the Adsense Ad?
So its not allowed by Google policies to click on adsense ads that are appearing on your website. So what do you do when you see a contextually targetted ad that is REALLY interesting to you?
Here is what you can do. Hover your mouse pointing over the ad, and look at the bottom left part of your browser, you should see a link come up. Enter the link in the address bar of your browser and click to go to that site.
Personally, i think its much simpler for Google Adsense to simply not credit links made from the same ip address as the author’s site. Because if you think about it, an author is passionate about what he writes about, and Google is good at contextual advertising. Put the two together, and you will see ads that really, really matter to the author.
The act of clicking on these ads , not for profit, but for ease of use issues is really, really tempting.
but what if you are in a proxied environment using only one or two ip public addresses, say a big company or university where there are many net surfers or users, and where some users may click on your site ads? only one ip willt register and, pffftt, your account is disabled.
Its just pure speculation on my part. Google hasn’t really told the world how they catch or determine click fraud. While IP adress is one of their basis, i think i read somewhere that they have algorithms that check on the time in seconds that elapses between clicks, and they have human beings that go thru log files.
I would also suspect that they look closely at the click thru rate (CTR) so anything possibly over 8-10% CTR is suspect to them.
http://www.alchemistmedia.com/Click_Fraud_Auditing.htm
http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1179/
The first and likely most pervasive is generally known as “competitor clicks”. In this scenario, a business works to drive their competition into financial distress by wasting their paid-advertising budget. Every time an ad is clicked, the cash register dings at the search firm providing that ad space. While keyword bids might be as low as $.015 per click, they can reach into tens and in some extreme cases hundreds of dollars per click.
Through simple and often stupid means or highly elaborate robot driven campaigns, one clicks away on their competitors’ ads. This form of click fraud is increasingly easy to detect and deal with however the onus is on the advertiser or their agent to diligently inspect and analyze their web-logs.
Jesse noted two case studies in which one business worked to burn the budget of competitors. One case involved having staff members click on paid-ads from their workstations. The other involved the use of a specialized “hitbot” commissioned to spend as much of a particular competitor’s money as possible.
After tracking several identifiable signatures such as IP address and repetition, click-times and the succession of clicks on an ad, she was able to help both clients get their money refunded.
The second basic form of click fraud is called Affiliate Fraud. Stemming from the vast networks of small affiliate partners who display paid ads generated by the major search engines on their websites, this type of click fraud is more difficult to detect and manage. When looking at a typical website, users are increasingly noticing paid advertising discretely appearing somewhere on the page.
These ads usually relate to the topic of the page and are delivered by the search engines based on keywords found on the page or through a specific choice by the webmaster. Every time one of these ads is clicked, the search engine bills the advertiser and gives 50% to the webmaster of the site the click came from.
The dozens of ways to scam this sort of system are obvious and as click fraud becomes a bigger concern for advertisers and search engines, people with a propensity for illicit gain are jumping on the short-term bandwagon.
There are a lot of highly talented programmers looking for work around the world. While all of us live in a time of legal transition in relation to cyber-crime, some people live in nations with relatively weak legal systems and abysmal cyber-investigative infrastructures. Faced with huge brains and tiny employment prospects, several turn to cyber-shenanigans for fun and profit. By exploiting fake IP addresses, using clever algorithms to determine click behaviours and finding ways to destroy identifying references, a fraud artist can stretch their gains over several months or even years without getting detected. There have been stories of click-for-pay positions offered to web users in Europe, South East Asia and Oceana in which surfers are paid to click on paid-ads on one of their employer’s thousands of websites. If done properly, it can be next to impossible for the major search engines to keep up.
Just don’t be to much greedy. Just wait and pray.