Second Time Around I Got Invalid Clicks

[steven mheakyle]

Hello Everybody!

This is the second time around i got invalid clicks. Last month i got attacked by lamers and forced my website to close for 48hrs. And the issue had been resolved already. Resulting to the drop of visitors which i made a huge ip deny list in my .htaccess

as of today i got 7xx of impression and 6xx of clicks i dont know why these lamers are trying to boot me out again. I already removed AdSense codes to my pages. Until things clears out.

This website is in the Linux Industry (open source) which gains top position in major SE. I believe these are competitors or some lamers. (which i dont know) My website consist of few pages and 22 pages with Adsense codes.

I send already an email to google informing the said activity and i gave them a link to my raw logs(txt) 0917-0919 for them to speed up the investigation.

I am seeking advice on what to do? I have search scipts to track the clicks but i didnt find one?

Any help or suggestions are acceptable.

[sandor]

smart move sending them a link to your logs

[nsqlg]

I never made *one* click invalid/fraudulent, but I have much fear to receive one mail like this....

[steven mheakyle]

what scares me most is the way these lamers do! as a referer they use my pages that ranks top in major SERP results. And go back and forth clickin' my ads.

IP address changes but the agents stays the same:

example:

"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; Linux 2.4.20-18.9; X11; i686)"
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040516"

I did some grep "Get /sample_page_with_adsense.html" > adsense_page_1.txt

for me really to see users that access the page and evaluate if its malicious.

Any other tips?

[Noel]

Steve I "kind of" had the same problem. Some idiots clicked over a 100 time in one day on my ads (this happened 4 times last month)

Now I've made my site that when a user clicks on an add (within a set time) it will not show any to that person.

I'm doing the filtering on IP's, but I guess you could do the same with that "User_Agent".

Good luck,

Noel

[teasers]

Noel i'm wondering how could you be able to do this. Did you use .htaccess?

[Noel]

Noel i'm wondering how could you be able to do this. Did you use .htaccess?

I'm using a log script that will when a click is made write the users IP to a database.

When the user comes back again to my site (within a set time), and his IP is still in the database, it will not show the Goooooogle ads.

I'm doing all this with Coldfusion, but for sure you can do the same with any other server side code.

Noel

[dmz17]

Good idea Noel.

It would be good if Google provided this feature itself, i.e. stop showing paying AdSense ads after N clicks from a given IP within T time and with both N and T settable by the Adsense account holder.

[Born_User]

Why doesn't Google ensure that multiple clicks from the same IP address within a certain amount of time on the same Adsense account just doesn't get counted? It wouldn't be that hard. Not for Google.

WHY DON'T THEY? People see increases in AS revenue, and instead of being happy, their worried. We all live with this fear that some unethical competitor is gonna just click-click-click on our ads and make us go away. Why doesn't Adsense feel like it's in their best interest to do something about it?

In fact, don't you feel that (as a publisher) Google has a duty to help ensure the protection of their publishers, when they are able?

It's not fair. They expect us to excersise diligence to help make sure that they're protected. Why can't they do the same?

[sonny]

Google already discounts redundant clicks, don't they?

[surfer67]

Noel, when you got those 100 clicks from the same person, did Google notify you of a problem? Surely their fraud detection system must have kicked in?

[JoshInTX]

Great idea Noel. Having that instituted on your website has got to hold some weight if you ever get the dreaded email. I'm going to try to code it right now!

[walrus]

"In fact, don't you feel that (as a publisher) Google has a duty to help ensure the protection of their publishers, when they are able?"

I offered to send them my logs once when i had a similiar incident and expressed my concerns about sabatoge by slimy webmasters.They replied they do work to protect both Adwords client and Adsense publishers.
Not very specific but it does imply they are aware of the problem.
I think you're right, it is in their best interest
and i hope they follow up legally on some of these guys cause God knows i cant afford it.

[Noel]

surfer67

I emaild google about it, and they thanked me for notifying them.

They also told me that they made a note of the findings in the records.

Noel