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robots, spiders, and AdWords...

directory spiders "clicking" ads?

         

Ankheg

4:00 am on Apr 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




Since starting an adwords campaign six weeks ago, I am of course interested in what exact terms people are searching for to find my site. Some of them really floor me, and a few are starting to anger me...

Just today I got five hits for a particular keyphrase, all from the same IP address, all from google.com, in the course of an hour. What was interesting was the actual search terms, as passed into the logs:

'kw1 kw2 melbourne'
'kw1 kw2 adelaide'
'kw1 kw2 brisbane'
'kw1 kw2 auckland'
'kw1 kw2 perth'

The IP resolved to a dialup somewhere in Australia. Now, I've been indexed in a couple of small directories already, who apparently found my site by searching in one or more search engines, but I wonder if this isn't some depressing new trend for directories to follow AdWords links? I know the topic of "illegitimate" clicks comes up sometimes, and is usually blamed on competitors, but this seems like a new one to me. Anyone else seen anything similar?

It should be noted that I'm in the U.S., not Australia or New Zealand, though my services are still available and relevant to customers "down under".

johannes

2:23 pm on Apr 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



If this is an automated service they should comply with googles robots.txt, and not follow adwords links: google.com/url?....

You could mail google and ask if these are legitimate clicks that you will pay for. The same user has clicked 5 times on the same ad. But since you have a broad match, the search query is different each time.

Fortunately I have not seen something like this in my logs yet.