Forum Moderators: martinibuster
G have initiated court proceedings against a publisher for artifically increasing their click throughs
If anyone knows ANYTHING about this, please sticky me a link and/or details. Thank you so much!
I am surprised that Google would go after someone so small in court, as opposed to just cancelling their account.
edit/> removed name of company/>
Is this the case you are thinking of?
[webmasterworld.com...]
I read some articles a couple of days ago, from sources that I deemed to be reliable, about this case one even has a case number. However since it has not been brought up by any of the major news sources I am not sure how legitimate this is.
That is why I edited my last post to remove the name of the company involved. The person involved may be a WW member and I would hate to spread rumors about their site.
edit</ Looks like it is now showing up on search engines. I made this post before I seen your latest post/>
I am surprised that Google would go after someone so small in court, as opposed to just cancelling their account.
That's part of what's so frustating. Google usually just cancels the account, and these criminals can just open a new account and continue business as usual. The criminals count on their smallness to avoid being taken seriously when they are found out.
I'm glad Google is doing something in this case. It's still only a civil suit, though. The next step is to get law enforcement involved in criminal prosecution of people committing fraud, even for very small thefts of money.
It seems like a bad idea to me. Google is admiting that they are having a hard time stopping this kind of thing. It says to me that there system to automaticly catch that kind of thing is not working that well.
How does catching a crook suggest that they're unable to catch crooks?
I think this strengthens the argument of advertisers that think they are being cheated by the adsense system. They then turn off advertising on adsense and legit adsense people make less money.
Google's AdSense revenues reached $384.3 million in the quarter that ended September 30, a 120 percent increase over the same quarter last year. So it would appear that quite a few advertisers are sticking around. :-)
How does catching a crook suggest that they're unable to catch crooks?
Because just like in the real world catching one crook is ok and a token effort, but its not good enough as there's another 1000 or more getting away with it.
They need to be more public about it and get the message across that if you get caught you will be in the court this will help deter the clickers much better than it appears now.
As it stands now its the publishers that end up getting the chop instead of the real clickers.
The program has been going for the last 17 months + and this is the first news of Google doing anything through the courts to show they mean business and that they are willing to do all things possible they can to protect the Adsense and Adwords programs.
I want to hear and see more in the news of google's efforts to stop the fraud, which in turn should boost confidence in the Adwords camp and for us Adsense publishers too.
A respectable site that doesn't put their ads right next to the content will always have a lower CTR than a poor site that places ads so that they are difficult to distinguish from the content... Your logic seems flawed?
W.
I didn't post the url, but the story is available doing a search on the title of this thread. Very interesting topic, that I'm sure a lot of folks would rather not see discussed. Seems like G would not want A LOT of transparency in this type of case.
Anybody remember the Bradley case? :)
Interesting tho':
The advertiser pays Google for the user’s click and Google, in turn, pays the majority of the money it receives back to the website author,”
That simple line should set the cat among the pigeons!
[xbiz.com...] and others (that seems to be the originator for the story lead I tracked back).
David Kramer, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who represents Google, said the suit should be a warning shot to other rogue operators."It sends a message to people participating in Google's advertising network that just because it's online, it doesn't make it OK to commit fraud," Kramer said.
[news.com.com...]
[sccaseinfo.org...]
I wonder if someone could get a copy of the filed documents and post them in the net.....
If they were cheating, I am in Google's side on this.
Maybe the smoking gun will get air of it and publish the files.
It seems like a bad idea to mewho knows what already happened... perhaps they already threatened google and G is required to act. Everybody in the industry knows that click fraud is common, this one sends the right message.
/yes I am bored.
Lots of people turn off their ads to adsense because of how worthless the traffic is. ... The less people understand how adwords works the better. If everybody understood how it works and analized [sic] their data adsense would become worthless. I think that adsense should use the same rules as adwords and disable accounts that have very low ctr's and/or give them a smaller cut by charging less to the advertiser.
Certainly Google should take very strong action against fraud. But if ogilvie is right, they should also take a much harder line against the "pure spam" sites he champions. Or at least "give them a smaller cut by charging less to the advertiser."
I have a high conversion rate
You mean a high clickthrough rate, right?
