Bogus Search Engine Referers

Obvious fraud trend

[jmorgan]

I admit I advertise with a few 'second tier' PPC providers. While the level of fraud is generally higher than the big players like Adwords and Overture, I am still usually able to eek out an acceptable ROI.

I monitor the clicks received from these PPC providers closely and notice that a large number of them have referers which point to fake search engines.

Basically when you go to their URL you get a search form and when you search for anything you either get no results, go back to the home page or get redirected to an adult site.

I would be guessing others would have noticed this too?

I notified the PPC provider once but it really is a hassle having to extract the relevant lines out from my logs and describe the clicks received when I'd rather be working on my site.

[gregbo]

This has been happening for quite some time.

What are you using to extract the referrers from your logs? In case you didn't know, there are a variety of tools available (open-source and commercial) that you can use to automate and simplify the task.