Pay-Per-Click Fraud by Publishers

Pay-Per-Click Fraud coming from advertisers and publishers. Google sues publisher for clicking on their own ads. In this April 17 article from the Washington Post. Author David A. Vise discusses the Google suit against Texas based Auctions Expert for allegedly clicking on it's own Adsense ads to the tune of $50,000 of income.

Critics of Google claim this suit is a diversionary tactic to keep people from looking at the real problem of click fraud from the advertisers perspective. Many advertisers claim they are routinely paying for bogus clicks on their Adwords ads displayed across the Google network of small publishers sites. When a publisher displays Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click ads, they are called Adsense for publishers. Those same ads are called Adwords from the Advertisers perspective and those advertisers pay for each click on their ads.

Google offers the option of turning off Adwords ads that display on small publishers sites, know as "Content Sites" in the Adwords control center where advertisers set up their ads, deciding what keywords and phrases will trigger their own ads and how much they pay for each click. If those ads are turned off for "Content Sites" then they only display on Google's own search engine results pages and a few very large distribution partners, like AOL web search.

Advertisers are claiming click fraud approaching as much as 50% of total ad spending in extreme cases. Click fraud has come to be known as "fraudulent clicks on Pay-Per-Click ads with no intention of buying anything from the advertiser".

PPC Click Fraud: Pay-Per-ClickPockets

As an advocate for SEO or Search Engine Optimization of content publishing as a path to ranking well in ORGANIC search engine listings, I've always kept Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, otherwise known as Search Engine MARKETING or SEM, at arms length. I manage PPC campaigns through Google Adwords for new clients who rank poorly in the search engines, or those who are brand new online retailers, as a method of increasing traffic over the short term to produce immediate results for those new clients while I busy myself with building and optimizing their web content over the longer term. The PPC brings them business right away while I'm toiling on the more indirect marketing work of increasing their relevant content, link building, press release distribution and RSS feeds.

I've heard many large PPC advertisers complain of click fraud if they are in competitive categories or low margin, high volume products sales. But this Tuesday the Wall Street Journal broke a story about a large law suit that the plaintiffs are hoping to move to a class action suit against PPC providers, Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, AOL, FindWhat. That media attention and the possibility of a giant class action suit has the search engine industry buzzing and got me thinking about the issue.

One of the methods I use to attract quality traffic is to gather articles by experts and publish those on client sites in relevant topics. I've operated a list for 6 years that exists solely to provide a forum for authors and publishers to meet and exchange those articles. The following article is one submitted by marketer "Merle" as she prefers to be known. I hope it serves to help enlighten on PPC click fraud as this issue heats up and gathers power. Take it away Merle:

"PPC ClickFraud: It's a Bigger Problem then You Think

By Merle http://MCpromotionsPress.com

Pay per click search engine advertising is one of the most popular ways to promote a website. With Overture and Google leading the pack, the industry as a whole has grown immensely in the past few years. According to a report by PriceWaterHouseCoopers, they estimate that Internet Advertising brought in more than $9 billion in 2004 alone.

With PPC advertising you choose "keywords/phrases," then bid how much you'd like to pay for each click. When a searcher goes to a search engine and types in one of your keyphrases, your short text ad appears, and if they click on it your account is then charged. In a "perfect world" this is the way it would work, but thanks to unscrupulous people, there's a dirty little secret known as "click fraud."

Click fraud is simply the act of clicking on ads for the direct purpose of costing the advertiser money. It's similar to paying out cash for false leads. According to InternetWeek.com, 60% of those who responded to a survey conducted by the "Search Engine Professional Organization" had stated that fraud is a problem when it comes to PPC advertising.

So where does click fraud come from? Well, there are actually a few different sources:

1. AdSense Users: Google Adsense has a program called "Adsense" that pays website owners to run their Adwords ads and compensates them per click. Google does monitor this and it's against their terms of service to click on any of the ads on your own site. If they find a publishers doing this, they will lose their accounts, but some may still be clicking under the radar.

2. Your Competitors: Your competitors could be clicking on your ads over a period of several days in order to deplete your ad budget.

3. Software: There are those who use automated clicking tools, such as robot programs, to click on PPC listings.

In some Asian countries, people are often paid to click on PPC ads for hours. Many don't know why they do it, and don't care, only that they'll be well rewarded for their efforts. If you do a search on any search engine you'll see plenty of sites looking to hire people for just this purpose. For more on this see...http://tinyurl.com/2ka5g

Most PPC networks have measures in place to protect you against click fraud. Overture tracks more than 50 data points, including IP addresses, browser info, users' session info and what they call "pattern recognition." They have a "proprietary system" in place for detecting fraud and a specialized team that monitors things and works with the advertisers to stop it.

Google offers suggestions to avoid click thru fraud, such as "using negative keywords" to keep your ads from showing up for products and services that are unrelated. They also suggest adding tracking url's to your links so you can track the traffic coming from Google. An easy way to do this is to add a ? to your links along with the identifier. For example, a tracking link to identify Google would look like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?referer-google

If you go through your log files, you'll be able to see your Google traffic at a glance.

If you suspect fraud, Google asks that you contact them right away, as they have a team of researchers that will investigate. They also take action to block future impressions from anyone they identify as committing click fraud. Like Overture, they also have "proprietary technology" that distinguishes between normal clicks and invalid ones. Google never bills you for any "bad clicks" that are caught by their system.

So what's an honest website owner to do? You need to be alert to any "suspicious activity" by researching your server logs or stats. If you're experiencing a lot of clicks and no sales you'll also want to take a closer look. You need to watch for any spikes in traffic, usually on one keyword or phrase and coming from only one PPC source. You need to measure and track all of your PPC accounts closely.

If this sounds like too much work, you may want to look at an outside service to take care of it for you. A variety of new services have opened recently to help combat the click fraud problem.

1. Keyword Max: http://www.KeyWordMax.com

Offers up a service called "Click Auditor," which monitors the activity on your PPC accounts and alerts you to any suspicious activity. You can request a free demo at the site.

2. Click Detective: http://ClickDetective.net

A website monitoring service that uses sophisticated tracking mechanisms to determine whether "visitor behavior" is normal or not. Offering a 15 day free trial. Easy to use, you just copy and paste a snippet of code on your page and add a campaign ID by logging into your account.

3. Click Assurance: http://ClickAssurance.com

An Internet Security Firm that specializes in click fraud. They will audit your PPC accounts and go after any refunds you are due because of fraud.

4. Who's Clicking Who: http://WhosClickingWho.com

An independent auditing service that tracks individual users for fraud. Can also detect abuse coming from proxy servers. A one month subscription is $79.00, which includes free installation and up to 50,000 transactions per month.

5. ClickLab: http://ClickLab.com/products/click-fraud

This service isolates bad clicks with a scorecard based detection system. Pricing starts at $50.00 per month and is based on the number of sites you need to track and their page views.

ClickLab also has a nice white paper you should download while visiting: "How to Defend Your Website Against Click Fraud."

Click fraud isn't going away anytime soon. If anything, it will probably get worse before it get's any better. It's up to you as a vigilant website owner to do what you can to keep your PPC advertising costs down. You can't stop it, but with the right tracking in place, it can be managed and controlled, and hopefully kept to a minimum.

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"Must Have Marketing Resources" Ebook by Merle is loaded with VALUABLE online resources you need to know about, when it comes to running your web business. Get your copy now at ... http://mcebook.mcpromotions.com

Web Search Semantic Web Evolution

The Evolution Of Web Search for the Semantic Web is discussed in this interesting Forbes article that quotes Tim Berners Lee, and his vision for search engines that understand search queries, not just based on words or phrases, but on word meanings and relation to each other.

Google Search Algorithm Patented?

Google Patent Application on search Algorithm Creates Spring Buzz!
By Mike Banks Valentine © copyright April 2, 2005

Google applied for a patent on their ranking algorithm as of 15 months ago on December 31, 2003 and that application was posted on March 31st at the US Patent Office. It got the discussion forums buzzing this weekend. Even though I had substantial work to do and was behind on a project, I couldn't resist the temptation to read the very long 14,000 word, 45 page application and see what it could mean to the volatile world of search.

So I tripped on over to the the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) and started reading the document United States Patent Application: 20050071741 seems to be Google applying for a patent on their search algorithm. There seems to be no reference to PageRank here, but it seems to be PageRank redefined with a few variations to limit link spamming and reduce stale results, along with multiple innovative elements not previously considered.

They discuss link spamming limitations extensively, which would be a welcome relief as Linking Psychosis is rampant and I'd like to see an end to it. Much of historical data related to pages seems to be a bit onerous because it would appear to limit the perceived value of a page unless it becomes wildly popular over time. Bigger is better seems to be a enduring theme of this algorithm as described generically in text of their application.

An odd addition to the historical ranking discussion is amazingly - the "Advertising Traffic" for a particular document! They will rank a site based on the advertiser choosing to advertise on a particular site. If Amazon wants to advertise on your site, then Google will rank you higher!

That's cool I guess, if you have a site that attracts highly rated advertising, and don't rely on cross promotion of your separate products or those of suppliers to appear in your site advertising. Example: If I have a discussion forum on coffee, don't I want to advertise my coffee products? Why would I serve ads from highly rated advertiser Starbucks to rank higher at Google? What if I sell thousands of products and simply cross promote and upsell my own products sitewide? Odd stuff, ranking based on advertisers.

How does affiliate advertising factor into that advertising element of the algorithm? Do they know you are advertising a book from Amazon as part of affiliate program through your direct Amazon affiliate program links and do they recognize tracking links through affiliate management companies differently than the tracking URL's of ad serving monsters like DoubleClick and confer higher ranking upon the big boys of advertising above affiliate tracking firms?

Also seems to call into question their own Adsense ads and how that factors into this algorithm! Do the Adsense ads along my blog border gain more ranking score because it is from a monster advertising company - Google - or is it downgraded because I'm not a "Premium" advertiser serving over 20 million content page views? Again, seems that reward for being large outweighs relevance in this formula. Or does it? How do they value Overture advertising in the formula? Adbrite? Smaller ad networks versus large advertising aggregators?

They extensively discuss historical data related to rankings over time, looking at seasonality, popularity during spikes in traffic due to news coverage of a particular topics and changes in ranking related to those items. The historical data related to ranking over time are interesting since they refer to link spamming, relevance, and topicality when they say:

"As a further measure to differentiate a document related to a topical phenomenon from a spam document, search engine may consider mentions of the document in news articles, discussion groups, etc. on the theory that spam documents will not be mentioned, for example, in the news. Any or a combination of these techniques may be used to curtail spamming attempts."

They've added another interesting element in the algorithm of determining value of pages based on "user maintained/generated data" (patent item 113) read that "bookmarks" and "favorites lists" built into your browser. Is this one of the reasons that Google recently hired Ben Goodger, the lead developer of Firefox? Snooping into my favorites and cookies on my machine seems like a bit more than I want Google doing on MY machine. It strains the limits of privacy as well. We can stop sites from serving us cookies, but can't stop who reads them? Ouch!

Further, they reference user’s browser cache files as a method of determining value of a site. “For example, the "temp" or cache files associated with users could be monitored by search engine to identify whether there is an increase or decrease in a document being added over time. Similarly, cookies associated with a particular document might be monitored by search engine to determine whether there is an upward or downward trend in interest in the document.” Apparently they can see this info, but I’d like them to stay out of my cache too!

It appears to apply further penalties to new sites by keeping them poorly ranked for even longer periods and applies an apparently new item to algorithms not seen or (at least discussed publicly) of long term purchase of domain names and historical data related to IP address and hosting company! Here's the snip about that longevity of domain registration to ranking:

"[0099] Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith."

I’ll be extending the term of my domain registrations ASAP! What a boon to registrars if that element of ranking becomes as valued as linking has been! Everyone will get 10 year registrations if they want to rank well.The domain name aftermarket will also be changed dramatically if this becomes as important as this element makes it appear to ranking. People will buy and sell domains when disposing of them rather than simply letting them expire at the end of the registration period, as most do now.

It appears they will be penalizing domains "associated" with "illegitimate" domains. Hopefully they have a method of determining that it isn't a competitor linking to your domain from their "illegitimate" domain! That suggests they will be able to eliminate "Domain Scrapers" that have been known to scrape search engine results of high ranking domains and posting those on "illegitimate domains" which in effect drags down the ranking of those previously highly ranked domains. How odd the search world is sometimes!

Altogether, it seems that older content will suffer overall because it hasn't changed, because nobody new is linking to it and because it will lose links over time. What if you are posting a historical document that you can't change or an authored piece that is copyrighted? Does it decrease the value of the information? Hmmmm. I guess links would continue to increase if the information remains valuable, so there is some protection in that. But older site content may be unchanged because it is popular, not because it is stale – that’s an odd Catch-22.

The anchor text issue discussed in this patent application suggests that "[0118] Unique Words, Bigrams, Phrases in Anchor Text " are significant in determining rank, because if natural links develop, they would vary when webmasters link to a document differently, some would use the URL and embed the link in that, others would use requested text from the webmaster if it were a link request that successfully garnered a link and still others might simply use Google's own Blogger "Blog This" link which simply takes the page title. (I routinely change link text generated by "Blog This" in my blog posts to emphasize the topic discussed and eliminate business/publication names usually added ahead of the topic of the page.)

The US Patent office has a link to images including illustrations and figures that are linked to the filing but they are absurdly large and don't fit in the viewable framed window. This is silliness. Do they mean to hide it by making it unviewable?
I'll attempt to post a smaller version of images on my blog. First Image

The final notable item seems to be me to be the clickthrough data that Google sees to sites from their own search results. They will rank site higher that get significant clickthrough rates from the Google SERP’s.

Google “may monitor the number of times that a document is selected from a set of search results and/or the amount of time one or more users spend accessing the document. Search engine may then score the document based, at least in part, on this information.”

How will they know how long I spend accessing the document unless they can monitor my actions AFTER I’ve left the Google SERP’s to visit the linked site? Wonder what’s at work in that? Do they have some way of tracking our actions after we leave their site? I wonder if this has anyting to do with the Google acquisition of Urchin traffic statistics company last week.

Well, it’s back to work for now, but it will be interesting to see where this patent application is discussed in forums and SEO blogs over the coming week.

Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization Specialist and blogs about the search world at: http://RealitySEO.com while operating a small business ecommerce tutorial at: http://WebSite101.com You can reach him through his contact form at:
http://SEOptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm