Google, Facebook, and co launch web blacklist to nail ad scammers

About time....

[tangor]

Google ad man Vegard Johnsen says tech big wigs including Facebook and Yahoo! have forged a giant blacklist to block fake web traffic contributing to advertising fraud.

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) pilot program will nix bot traffic using a blacklist which could cut a significant portion of web traffic; Google's DoubleClick blacklist alone blocked some 8.9 percent of traffic.

"The newly shared blacklist identifies web robots that are being run in data centers but that avoid detection by the IAB/ABC International Spiders and Bots List," Johnsen says.

"By pooling our collective efforts and working with industry bodies, we can create strong defenses against those looking to take advantage of our ecosystem.

[theregister.co.uk...]

[topr8]

seems to me like loads of folks here are ahead of the game, Google et al could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had subscribed to the Search Engine Spider and User Agent Identification [webmasterworld.com] forum right here, all along.

[MrSavage]

Great news. I've seen also on a similar topic, community driven a Wordpress login attempts plugin that has done the best job for dealing with mass hits to wp-login.php. Collectively, sharing that data, this crud can be cleaned up. That is, until there is some work around. I think this is a big move in the right direction. I'm looking forward to hearing more on this and some positives from it.