europeforvisitors - 3:50 pm on Mar 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

But this type of fraud would only apply to the content network wouldn't it?

Not according to Google's CFO. From a CNNMoney.com article [money.cnn.com] on click fraud (relevant phrase highlighted in bold):

The main perpetrators appear to be competitors of advertisers and also scam sites set up for the sole purpose of hosting ad links provided by Google, through its AdSense unit, or Yahoo!, through its Overture service.

If anything, "competitor fraud" is probably easier to do on SERPs than on the content network, because the perpetrator knows the domains where the ads will appear (Google.com, Google.co.uk, or whatever) and which keyphrases will trigger the ads.

If Google will finally allow advertisers to select and limit which content network websites you want your ads to run on, advertisers would have the ability to stop those websites that do not generate revenues.

That's coming soon, according to this AdWords Forum thread. [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: trillianjedi at 1:56 pm (utc) on Mar. 6, 2007]
[edit reason] Fixing formatting... [/edit]