Forum Moderators: martinibuster
No answer came back overnight and I have not had the Adsense Rapid Response Unit burst through my window and sieze my weblog records.
The thing is, the clicks were still rolling in this morning. I drilled down with analytics to find which page was getting the undue attention and found one page yesterday with 2 visits and 70 pageviews.
So I took Adsense off that page and sent the above information and a screenshot of my Analytics detective work to Adsense support.
Is there anything else I can do? anyone else had experience of this and how did you handle it?
Thanks
Adam
So I took Adsense off that page
Pulling down the ads complete makes the click attacker suspicious
I would replace the AdSense with an Amazon block.
Nobody becomes banned for to many clicks on Amazon.
Hey, I love the idea of the "Adsense Rapid Response Unit". Presumably these are the guys and gals with the black helicopters and the REALLY BIG hard discs and USB pen drives to suck all the data out of your Web site and sell it of the the highest-bidding conspirator in the military-industrial complex?
Kewl! Send us a pic when they arrive. Be sure to ask them to pass my regards to Mr Cutts! B^>
Rgds
Damon
PS. You might also consider AdBrite as a drop-in AS replacement for abnormally-high click-through rates: it only takes about 10 minutes to set them up, but be sure to put content in an iframe because they can be a bit slow to serve ads sometimes. Mixing AS and AB on a page is allowed, as I have verified a couple of times. Your AB metrics will soar if your CTR goes up!
So a transient 700% CTR doesn't bother me.
But obviously 70 clicks is ridiculus.
I have recently noticed browsers that properly load pages but then continually GET the core page content over and over again. This could be a sign of malware and the malware is also designed to generate clicks if Adsense is present.
I've mentioned this once before regarding these repeated GETs of the same page, but no one has chimed in. It still is an infrequent occurance in my logs.
If you come in browsing through an ISP like AOL, every request tends to have a different IP address, perhaps this still gets through Google's click filters.
Did this attack use multiple IP addresses?
Another thought is scrapers (crawlers, bots) are proactively looking for certain Adsense Ads and then just clicking on those, perhaps to attack competition.
What ads were showing on this page? Could be a clue!
Oh well it's fun to hypothesize (brainstorm), sometimes it leads to novel solutions to problems.
The originating search that delivered them to my site was in MSN (organic results) with the term "ADSENSE+ADVERTS".
They came in to the specific page I mentioned earlier and clocked up 30 page views of the same page, then later returned directly to that page and clocked up a further 45 page views.
Taking the search information and looking for it in the logfile I found an IP and was able to look that up to find that not only does it come from an ISP in Worthing, UK but also it seems to be static and applied to a particular business on a particular street in Worthing.
Surely nobody would be stupid enough to start manually generating clicks from their own internet connection that is attached to their business? Must be some form of hijacking going on.
Do you think I should forward the exact line from my logfile to Google as well?
Nowt but seaweed and rain in Worthing, let me tell you!
Send whatever you have to Google; they can probably work it out for themselves but you might save them a little time and effort.
Rgds
Damon
Who ever it is may just be an innocent victim, and something infested their PC. But the search terms seem suspicious. Of course even the search could be generated by some kind of virus or malware.
The browser version information from your log entry could be useful to Google.
I've noticed you're new to WW, welcome. I'd like to hear how you make out with your investigation. This could be the tip of the iceberg.
I'll update this thread if I hear anything further or if anything else happens. For now though it seems all quiet in my stats. Hope it stays that way.
