I'm starting to think someone's gunning for me. Over the last couple of months, my main two sites have been subjected to click fraud "attacks". The pattern is very simple: basically a page gets accessed on a regular basis (every 20 or 30 seconds is the norm) for several hours and my CTR goes through the roof, i.e. over 50%. Until yesterday, the "referer" header was always null, so I was able to handle things by changing the pages to remove the ads whenever there was no referer. That would hinder some legitimate traffic, but at least ads would still show in most cases. Then the other party got smart and started doing the same thing but with a valid referrer, so I had to get smarter and start blocking specific URLs. Very annoying, though, because I have to monitor things closely. I've been reporting things to Google as they happen (they had to deduct $600 in bogus clicks last month) and pass on some of my logs to give them some data.
What I don't know is if these people are trying to get me booted out of AdSense (what I call disbarring click fraud -- maybe they don't like what I write about or they think it would be funny to get me kicked out?) or if they're just targeting specific ads that happen to display on those sites. Anyone else run into this before? Most of the IP addresses don't have DNS entries, either. I wish I could track it to someone specific, but that doesn't seem possible with what I have access to.
Eric
