Jensense has a bit of a scoop – she’s been asked by Google to announce a new feature that enables people to report a publisher who is committing click fraud:
‘If you know of a publisher engaging in click fraud, you can now report them anonymously by clicking the “Ads by Google” on that publisher’s site, and then including the term “invalid clicks” in the comment field. And if you do not wish to stay anonymous, you can include your email address as well.’
Read more at Reporting publisher click fraud to Google just got easier
This comes on the tail of Google allowing people to report Adsense spam.
Google are definitely taking things up a notch when it comes to cleaning up their system which has obviously been abused by many for some time now.
I applaud them for their efforts but get a little nervous about them also and wonder how many times these tools will be used by competing publishers in the hope of gaining a competitive edge over another site.
I have confidence that the Adsense people will be able to weed out this type of behavior of course – but I’m still a little nervous about it.
I can understand you Darren, i’m a bit worried aswell..
I’m currently a member in about 5 forums that engage with graphic designing, alot of members there do have sites that is in direct competition with mine, i wonder if they’ll try to do something like this..
Heat
Some people think it’s a hell of a joke to dob someone in (as you Aussies say). But being put on a blacklist or secretly monitored is no fun if it’s your business involved.
I’m not keen on troublesome publishers AdSense as well. But, like you, I’m worried that this sort of thing may potentially raise more problems — even with legitimate publishers.
I recently posted about Google being sued for not doing enough about click fraud, and the potential for a class action.
Maybe Google are being forced to fix the click fraud problem because they fear such action could snowball.
I too can see this quite easily being abused by competitors to fraudulently report click fraud
I’d be worried about if someone doesn’t like what you wrote about them on a site and decides to try to submit your website.
I think the worry is overrated. Or maybe I’m just an optimist. I would think that Google would use the reporting tool to BEGIN an investigation into the facts, not just to kick someone right out of the marketplace.
I’m with Denise. Follow Google’s Terms of Service and you should be fine… Now… to go and read them again so as to remember. :)
Well you know, I’ve actually come across a lot of websites that explicitly violate the TOS and still remain in the Adsense program. And these are, I think, some very popular websites and I’m a bit confused as to why they still have active adsense accounts. One site I saw was a video search directory, that stores videos uploaded by their registered members and makes them available to anyone who accesses their sites. The videos are indexed and searchable. You’ll see alot of copyrighted material such as video clips from TV shows. This site is pretty popular and it would be a surprise if google hasn’t even heard about them yet. I also saw this one site that has keywords written around the adsense code. CSS is then used to hide the keywords so that the site gets targeted ads regardless of the content. You really start to wonder. You hear stories of people who inexplicably have their adsense accounts cancelled and then you come across some sites that clearly violate the guidelines and yet they’re still running the ads.