bears5122 - 6:17 am on Jul 18, 2008 (gmt 0)

Several months ago I blocked 2 domains. Noticed after a while that I was still getting YSM traffic from them, so I called and asked them to investigate. Called back several times over the next few weeks, never received any proactive updates from YSM, and actually had my complaint laughed at by one of the reps. Final outcome? Single-digit dollar amount refund. AND I'm still getting traffic from both domains, although I've been asked to trust that they just won't be billing me for it or for any of the traffic I received during their investigation.

Had a similiar problem to yours.

What is most likely happening is that the traffic you are getting from those domains are not the ones that are actually sending you the traffic.

Yahoo! basically allows their search partners to give out their feed to anyone with an internet connection. So lets say you have domainA.com that goes to Yahoo! and gets a search feed. Well domainA.com is going to give their feed out to everyone they can and take a cut. domainB.com is a domain that gets the feed from domainA.com. They display your ads on their site but redirect every click through domainA.com.

So in your stats it is looking like you are getting traffic from domainA.com, while in reality you are getting it from domainB.com. It's just the fact they run a redirect means you can't figure out what sites are actually displaying your ads.

It's a bug in their system of sorts. The blocked domain feature seems to only work on the displaying of the ads, not on the actual clickthrough. So if domainB.com is not in your blocked list (which it wouldn't since you have no idea they are the real ones sending the traffic), your ads show. It will also charge you for the click.

The issue also isn't new to Yahoo!. I, along with many others in PPC reported it and have spoken to people at Yahoo! (the issue was also passed on at last year's Pubcon). After reporting it, I even received a couple phone calls from someone on Yahoo!'s technical team who was very interested in what we had found. We were able to demonstrate the problem and give real examples. I did get a follow-up e-mail weeks later saying the issue was fixed for my account.

Not saying that your problem is this, but it sounds awfully familiar. Would the primary offending domain be a smaller parked domain service with extensive ties to click fraud overseas by chance?