Become.com bot clicking on AS ads.

and registering impressions...

[ionchannels]

I have been checking my logs and I have found that the become.com bot has been clicking multiple AS ads and greatly inflating my ad impressions. I don't know how these bots can execute JS, but they can. I had issues before with the bot inflating my private CPM ads through PHPadsnew, now this. Has anyone else had trouble with this bot?

[Rodney]

I didn't think it was technically possible for a bot like that to click on javascript ads.

How are you sure it is clicking on the ads?

[ionchannels]

I am tracking user agents, referrers etc... which click on the ads using javascript... Theoretically the script should not pick up bots, but become.com is appearing hundreds up to thousands of times a day...

[jomaxx]

Those scripts (at least the ones I am familiar with) use "onFocus" event to trigger an action. Even if a spider was going to execute the Javascript, open an iframe, and then click on the ads, I doubt there would be any point setting the focus.

Here's an alternative hypothesis: This bot looks inside your Javascript in order to find URL's to spider. It saw the name of a tracking image in the code and went and got it (numerous times).

(This is specifically regarding local click tracking. If it's messing up your official AdSense stats then you should ban that spider ASAP.)

[ionchannels]

Jomaxx... I think you are right, good call. The clicks weren't registered by AS and I assumed they had filtered out any clicks by the become bot, but your suggestion seems more plausible. It's a very greedy bot, and gets stuck all the time, I've excluded it from all my sites now...

[incrediBILL]

Let's get serious, Google has booted individuals for "invalid clicks" for a lot less activity than a rogue spider would generate.

I would suspect that if spiders were actuating AdSense ads then Google would block them from loading the ads at their server level.

If you think the spider is running AdSense then contact AdSense support and see what they say about this as it's a content network wide issue, not just specific to your web site.

[Tropical Island]

I would suspect that if spiders were actuating AdSense ads then Google would block them from loading the ads at their server level.

The owner of LinkAlarm confirmed a couple of weeks ago that even if the bot follows the link then it is blocked by the Google ad servers.