About Fraudulent Clicks and Averages

Why it happens sometimes and how to know

[brainybetty]

If you have a webhosting service that automatically submits your site to the search engines, say, once a month or so - you may end up with fraudulent clicks.

Here's why. Many times, the robot is set to follow the INDEX, FOLLOW rule, which means basically index *this* page you are looking at and then follow all the clicks on this page to other pages on the site.

iPowerWeb has a marketing solution it offers to its customers that does this every 30 or 45 days. The way to *fix* this is: add a meta tag to the head section of your page that indicates INDEX, NO FOLLOW.

That way, every single link on your page won't be clicked (say in a matter of seconds which probably sets off some type of warning bells at Google) and you will be less liekly to be charged with fraudulent clicks.

This happened to my site.

What I am concerned about for my site is that the CTR averages are not very average over the period of a month or so. I find that I may have a steady (+/- .25) rate for 15 days and then have it drop all of a sudden for the rest of the month. This really bites. It doesn't allow businesses to plan well on income from advertising... even for the same number of impressions and clicks. I realize this has to do with their other program and the cost bid per click. Still i wonder sometimes whether the ability to have more time for content is really worth it for the hassle of the wild swings in weekly averages. Just when I think I have a handle on the days and returns, it all goes to hell.

[Dolemite]

I appreciate your effort to try to address this problem, but you're plain wrong on this.

Adsense code is javascript that writes an iframe to your page. Search engine spiders don't parse or run JS, and thus couldn't follow the links contained in the code.

Futhermore, adding an INDEX, NOFOLLOW robots meta-tag would prevent spiders from following your own internal and external links as well, and may not even apply to any content in a frame.

[Jenstar]

I agree with Dolemite, spiders are not clicking on your AdSense links. Imagine the outrage of AdWords advertisers if spiders did that.

[chiyo]

yep the same could be said of "link checkers" and a heap of automated robots including se spiders out there.

[cornwall]

From AdSense FAQ..

""3. Why do I detect a different number of impressions than what shows in my reports?
We count impressions only when our ad code is executed by a user's browser. There are therefore several factors that would cause a discrepancy between the impressions you register and the impressions listed in your AdSense account. Instances that wouldn't execute the code include:

Other spiders, robots, crawlers from other search engines
Browsers that don't have JavaScript enabled or don't support JavaScript
Browsers that don't support the <iframe> tag
Programs that people may have written to grab website content
""

[div01]

As an aside, even if you did not have the 'index,follow' tag, most spiders would follow links on the page - and that is most webpages. As mentioned above this theory doesn't fly...

[killroy]

In summary, relax, no submission service is going to cause undue AdSense clicks.

SN