Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My Strategy
Immediately notify Google if you notice an unexplained large spike in any of the following areas...
Page impressions
Clicks
Clickthrough rate
Effective CPM
Your earnings
The worst thing that can happen is that they see that you are a responsible publisher who is concerned about fraudulent clicks and who is looking out for advertisers.
Later on, should your site ever be the target of fraudulent clicks, Google will most likely review your history with them along with all communications. Having such emails in your file may help your cause.
I would love to see other suggestions for handling such situations and remaining in G's good graces.
I have content site which occasionally people try to steal all the content of, or, equivalently, mindlessly point one of those "download-the-website-to-read-later" tools at it which ain't gonna work on 8GB+. Sometimes people's legit browsers/spiders just go mad and no harm is intended of course (I even had to write to Google once and ask them to stop taking out my site while spidering the images!).
So over the years I have developed a series of automated countermeasures ranging from traffic shaping at the border routers to automatic detection and slowing of traffic to idiots and broken/aggressive clients as described above, to leave bandwidth for legitmate humans. I think this probably does help freeze out some potential AdSense misuse too, but if I see any significant problems I shall simply extend my countermeasures to trim highly-atypical access patterns.
Killing 10% of obviously atypical traffic probably kills 90% of unwanted use without hurting legitimate visitors.
The trick is to identify robust metrics that don't need to be tweaked manually too often, but that is going to be very specific your wanted and unwanted access patterns.
Rgds
Damon
