Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Let's imagine the following scenario: someone wants to ban a small website from adsense (earning 5-10 $). Because he's not too computer-savvy, he decides to manually click the victim's ads only several times a day rather than getting some bot to click thousands times in a short timeframe(or whatever the techniques). How long would it take for Google to detect fraudulent clicks? Would the publisher receive a warning or get banned?
Storm
That's all i'm saying on this topic ...
No, I don't think it's coming - I didn't say I did, did I?
I just wondered how Google would behave in such situation.
<You my friend, certainly have a gift (and history) for <starting some unusual threads!
:) well, I've seen much more unusual threads;-)
<I think the victim will get banned rather than warned.
<And I think it will happen rather sooner than later.
Yes, I thought the same ... after all it's bussiness: the victim would most probably bring more costs than benefits. On the other hand, if google started banning all such people, they would create a opportinity for others to ban competetive sites. In other words, there has to be some clever algo...
Storm
[edited by: stormshield at 4:07 pm (utc) on Aug. 14, 2006]
If your site is, in all other respects, completely within the AdSense TOS, I would think it wouldn't present a problem.
TJ
If you have an AdSense account then Google knows your IP and computer information. If it was determined that you yourself were causing invalid clicks (on someone else's website), why not ban you, the perpetrator of those clicks?
Martinibuster, you may have hit on a reason why we see so many posts that begin, "I got banned for invalid clicks, and I've never clicked on my own ads..."
Naturally if the "competitor" here is another AdSense publisher, the perp will be booted first but this may very well be a case of tossing the baby out with the bathwater if Google has any reason to believe that this will be a recurring problem.
In short, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Would the publisher receive a warning or get banned?
We don't know. It's a fair bet that neither would happen, that the clicks would be identifiable as coming from a single source, and that Google would simply ignore them.
We do know, from the court-ordered independent analysis, that the percentage of completely automatic publisher bannings is "increasing". What are the criteria that makes Google confident enough to just let a computer algorithm terminate publishers? We don't know. Does it only kick in for the most obvious and stupid behavior (e.g., clicks all coming from same IP address that accesses publisher account), or is their philosophy to simply terminate the publisher without paying much attention to how likely it is that the publisher is actually participating in the fraud? We don't know.
Does it only kick in for the most obvious and stupid behavior (e.g., clicks all coming from same IP address that accesses publisher account), or is their philosophy to simply terminate the publisher without paying much attention to how likely it is that the publisher is actually participating in the fraud? We don't know.
True, but I doubt if there's any shortage of publishers who are guilty of "the most obvious and stupid behavior." Some crooks aren't very bright (like the Chicago cop who got busted for soliciting bribes after he was dumb enough to accept a check).
Does it only kick in for the most obvious and stupid behavior (e.g., clicks all coming from same IP address that accesses publisher account), or is their philosophy to simply terminate the publisher without paying much attention to how likely it is that the publisher is actually participating in the fraud? We don't know.
Given how easy it is to generate traffic from a multiplicity of IP addresses, either by individuals acting in concert or compromised machines, G can't rule out the possibility that the publisher is participating in the fraud.
