Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I do not click on my ads and have told other people in my house not to and am hoping this is enough. We all share in IP since we connect through a router so hopefully they heed my warnings!
They could probably make hundreds of dollars a day, just by driving around and doing this.
If you are clicking your own ads because you are interested in them this is not fraudulent and therefore would not be against Google's TOS.
Somehow I don't think it would be productive to debate the motivation behind your clicks with AdSense Support after receiving a termination e-mail. Remember, Google can cancel the relationship at any time, for any reason (just as you can). They don't have to prove you guilty.
I can imagine that Google is using a scoring system. When a site reaches a high enough score using the above measurements, Google shuts them down. If you really think about it, there is enough info to catch just about anybody who is varying from the mean more than a few percent.
That sounds like a reasonable hypothesis. I've often thought something similar goes on with Google search, where one or two "grey hat" SEO practices may be given the benefit of the doubt but a statistically unlikely combination of questionable practices may trigger a manual check, a filter, or an automatic penalty.
What's stopping those people that get the high paying like $30 clicks from going to a library computer and clicking once, going to a internet cafe and clicking, and just making a whole day out of finding different computers to make 1 click on?
They could probably make hundreds of dollars a day, just by driving around and doing this.
The reason the advertisers are willing to bid $30 per click is because they either have a very high conversion rate and/or a very high profit margin. If someone were to do as you suggested, their ROI would plummet, and the bids would drop very quickly. It would work, but only for a very very short time.
I keep seeing threads around here about "one errant click" leading to a complete ban, so I guess I'm a bit surprised I haven't gotten banned yet.
Are a few days enough for me to rest easy that I'm out of the woods or does it often take days or weeks for Google to send the nasty email?
See post 10 in this thread for more info. [webmasterworld.com]
But I see that this is answered on the post you link to. Thanks
I'm worried about all these issues—"friends" trying to help me out, internet cafes and Kinkos where I've checked stats, etc. But should I? Surely the *revenue* has to be a factor. My site rarely has a click worth more than $.10. As such, I couldn't make any money by, as was suggested, driving around to libraries and clicking once. And I'd need a pretty diverse set of friends clicking the ads every day to make even a few bucks.
I hope Google thinks about these factors. What do you think?
I might add that it's probably not easy to reach the "shutoff" score. I think that in 99% of cases, the webmaster knows full well some of the mistakes they made.
Some people don't seem to be able to understand this simple concept.
You won't believe some of the "justifications" I've heard for own-ad clicking! I've tried to argue the ethics angle in several threads i.e. theft of advertiser's money and: you did a deal - stick to what you agreed you'd do. But there are several webmasters who've attacked that quite strongly. With them apparently it's OK to click your own ads as long as you do it without getting caught. It's people like these (and their more intelligent/dangerous cousins who try to build sophisticated Adsense fraud schemes) who will undermine the program to the point where either it folds... or Google severely restricts which publishers they partner with.
And this makes my 1000th posting :)
From an ethical point of view: I agree more or less with Macro. You sprecifically agreed not to click your own ads. Why do it then? It is bad for the program.
They should already have stricter guidelines. You wouldnt believe all the crap out there that has AdSense on it.
They should already have stricter guidelines. You wouldnt believe all the crap out there that has AdSense on it.
They seem to be getting a little more hardnosed, to judge from some of the posts we've seen here.
Unfortunately, they opened a Pandora's box when they went for a dominant market share (a la Amazon.com) by opening the program to just about anyone and by letting publishers place the AdSense code on multiple sites without requiring site-by-site approval. Now they've got to clean up the mess. "Smart pricing" is a baby step in that direction. The next step will probably be the use of conversion tracking to weed out sites that deliver worthless or low-quality traffic. (If that's the case, they'll need to review some of their "premium partners," too. On the AdWords forum, a couple of advertisers have griped about traffic from weather and mapping sites with a zero-percent conversion rate.)
Cookie can tell if you are from the same machine
