Victim of sabotage: Google saying invalid clicks on my sites!

Now what? I wasn't at all

[silverbytes]

I received today an email from Google saying they detected invalid clicks coming from my ads. I don't click my own ads neither engourage anybody to do it.
I certainly think somebody is trying to hurt my sites.
What can I do?!

<snip>

[edited by: martinibuster at 9:51 pm (utc) on May 4, 2006]
[edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[europeforvisitors]

You can write back, say what you just told us, and offer to supply your server logs if those might prove helpful. (In my experience, they'll decline the offer, but at least you'll be making a positive gesture.)

Also, the sabotage may not be aimed at you; it may be an advertiser trying to sabotage another advertiser. (A while back, Google's CFO gave a speech where he identified "competitor click fraud" as a concern.)

[silverbytes]

it may be an advertiser trying to sabotage another advertiser

That's what I'm afraid. Furthermore Google don't tell me what they found...

Anybody experienced something similar?

[moTi]

sorry for you, but interesting. looks like a blindly shot off warning email in unawareness of who is the offender and who is the victim. with your posts count in mind, i tend to believe you. must be kind of a sneaky distributed click attack that couldn't be revealed by google.

[silverbytes]

Nobody want to spoil an account clicking it's own ads. I'm the last one.

Time ago a competitor called me saying his ads wasn't showing because I was clicking on them (He was really paranoid because we were targeting similar keyword)
The guy is an idiot, I wasn't clicking those ads, and probably is was bidding low or something.
The case was he called me saying: "Google told me it was you".
Their ads started to show again and he never contacted me again. But If I must suspect from anybody I'd say he was the only person I know that might want to hurt my ads...

The case is Google is not saying me what they found, what is very awful. What if my competitor clicks my ads repeatedly just to generate trouble with my account?

[jomaxx]

You've been around long enough that you probably know this, but "invalid clicks" can also refer to a variety of TOS violations. It's not necessarily the clicks themselves that are the problem.

[ken_b]

SB;

I'm sorry to hear this happened to you. Here's a library thread about getting reinstated into Adsense.

Reinstated in Adsesnse [webmasterworld.com]

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

[toldan]

I received today an email from Google saying they detected invalid clicks coming from my ads. I don't click my own ads neither engourage anybody to do it.
I certainly think somebody is trying to hurt my sites.
What can I do?!

You're lucky Google hasn't banned you right on the spot. This is a sign that Google is loosening up its rules, which is great. Wait till they finish their investigation and co-operate with them.

[silverbytes]

They have no reason at all to ban me, I'm very honest and their ads are generating U$ for them too...

BTW they don't seem to be investigating what happened. They seem to be notifiying me, they say they will discount those "fraud clicks" to give advertisers the discount for those fraudulent clicks.

<snip>

I can't control what robots or automated clicking tools or angry competitors do... and I wasn't clicking anything.
Answered this to them and still have no news...

[edited by: martinibuster at 4:18 am (utc) on May 5, 2006]
[edit reason] TOS [webmasterworld.com] . [/edit]

[toldan]

They have no reason at all to ban me, I'm very honest and their ads are generating U$ for them too...
BTW they don't seem to be investigating what happened. They seem to be notifiying me, they say they will discount those "fraud clicks" to give advertisers the discount for those fraudulent clicks.

They have every right to ban you. They don't care whether you are honest or not - they want to protect their advertisers. If your website generates substantial amount of invalid clicks, then the easiest solution is to ban you and protect advertisers. I am not proponent of strict rules, and Google is already proving they are loosening their rules, which is good.

I can't control what robots or automated clicking tools or angry competitors do... and I wasn't clicking anything.
Answered this to them and still have no news...

Dude, nobody cares. If your website is under constant click attacks, the easiest solution for Google is to ban your account. They need to protect advertisers. This time they were fair and you should thank them. They are investigating; this time they will discount clicks and let you go, but if these things continue happening - then Google will have no choice. They will rather ban you, than risk losing advertisers.

[Key_Master]

Hola silverbytes.

They obviously care enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and discount the fraudulent clicks rather than ban you straight out. I wouldn't say they are loosening the rules either as others have also been given the same benefit of the doubt in the past and are still AdSense publishers today.

Now that the ball is in your court you need to take action. Pull the ads temporarily, install a click tracker, and tighten up security on your site. Look for suspicious activity in your log files and take measures to block it.

Good luck.

[hal12b]

If you can pinpoint IP addresses that could be causing this, I would block them immediately. I had/have similar problems with idiots filling out my contact forms with gibberish and spam. It will work until they get a new ip address.

[silverbytes]

I don't know what kind of click tracker do you mean.
and I don't even know where to start since I manage several websites and don't know where are those fraudulent clicks happening, so guess in each one individually(Ouch)

What would you look in logs?
Am I the first person in this situation or somebody passed this before and perhaps may say what to do exactly?

[Jafo]

Well, it all depends on what they did. Without google giving you any information, it is really next to impossible to find out.

A click tracker probably won't work with a bot, because as far as I know, clicks can only be tracked with the ONUNLOAD attribute, which a bot would ignore.

In the end, the best thing to do would be to pull the ads for a couple days, let the fraudster think he bumped you, and put them back up.

[jema]

It sounds to me like using a tracking script is a good idea, as it might tell you the source of the problem. It is an invaluable weopon in your adsense armoury to have a tracker anyway.

Aside from that, I'd do nothing, google are not banning, they are notifying. If google ban every good account with an occasional problem, they will lose a lot of accounts, it doesn't help google if they do this.

I'm easing into the half million impressions a day bracket, so far no one has afaik tried to mess my site about in this way, but because of the bracket i'm in, I know it will happen sooner or later :( but I don't expect google to drop me when it happens.

[silverbytes]

Anybody using a good tracking script to reccomend then? (Sticky me in that case and Sorry)
Anyway what would I expect to see? What urls are or ip are clicking on my ads? Should I expect a lot of clicks in a short time?

[ncw164x]

go to google and type "adsense tracking"

there are 100's of scripts out there what give you the information your after

[jema]

I'm using asrep with no complaints. Plus for good measure my own code.

[silverbytes]

(The one you mention has a trial) Is it difficult to install?

I've found one open source, it's a pain to configure so hope to be able to run it...

[jema]

asrep was very easy to set up. My only complaint is that it cannot cope with the half million a day level, as it accesses itself on all views even when set to log only clicks.

Hence personally I use a little php to reduce the logging to 20% which is enough for me to see what gives.

<?php
if (rand(0,4)==0)
{
?>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"
src="http://mydomain/asrep/record.php">
</script>
<noscript>
<img width="1" height="1" border="0"
src="http://mydomain/asrep/record.php?rep=v&transport=img" />
</noscript>
<?php
}

[Hobbs]

I feel your agony silverbytes,
I discovered that Adsense discounted $xx from last month's referral earnings when the earnings link was posted yesterday, the reports/overview shows more $ than the amount in the payment link, I take it that they detected some sort of invalid conversions (didn't know it was possible), I did not get any notifications, and wouldn't know what to do if I receive one, the money is trivial compared to the worry, and what is a publisher supposed to do? Stay up all night or hire staff on 3 shifts a day monitoring logs in real time? Even with a click tracker (which would need another dedicated server with my page impressions) you can only catch them after the attack, and just banning an IP is like swatting an empty table after the fly flew off.

It's good they value your business enough to keep you onboard and give you the benefit of the doubt, assume they are just notifying you of the discount as a good business practice for in reality you stand helpless against malicious activities, even with a click tracker, Google holds all the cards, I am also wondering more now about the chances of new and small publishers, it's a jungle out there!

[palomar55]

If you have a quality site with strong traffic then also consider diversifying. AdSense isn't the only game in town.

[foxtrot3]

Sorry to hear about your situation. I got banned for "click fraud" back in November, and to this day I have no idea what happened. I certainly did not click any of my own ads.

Sent many emails to G but the only response I got was the generic "Sorry - you lose, our secret algorythm says blah blah blah".

Hope things work out better for you.

[silverbytes]

Foxtrot, what happened then, you are out of Adsense forever? Did you go with other system?

Palomar: And about diversifying what you mean exactly?

[foxtrot3]

Apparently I'm out for good. I tried Kanoodle for a while and they're worthless. Now have some Amazon ads up and have made a few sales, but nothing that compares with Adsense. I'm thinking of giving Azoogleads a try, but haven't yet.

[foxtrot3]

Also I applied to Yahoo a couple of times but never got a response.

[silverbytes]

How bad. Can't belive there's no other profitable alternative yet... perhaps MSN will change that in near future?

[gregbo]

How bad. Can't belive there's no other profitable alternative yet... perhaps MSN will change that in near future?

Any CPC program will be inherently vulnerable to click fraud.

[charlesgan]

its still better than directly closing down your account.

if google detected invalid clicks, its good when they remove that specific CPM and CTR earning. rather than closing account.

eg, when uploading new web page, i do lots of testing, and modification until i meet the right page feels. probably causing tenth of page view at there. Not mind of G minus those page view from my CPM. if they directly close my a/c... i really mad.

[silverbytes]

Perhaps that's what happened. They don't provide any information about the specific issue.