AVG's LinkScanner

Are we being charged for these clicks?

[Kobayashi]

I recently upgraded to the newest version of AVG's Anti Virus software. It has a toolbar module called LinkScanner which labels the search engine results and ads from the 3 major search engines as safe or not with a little icon next to them in what appears to be real time. Does anyone know if advertisers are being charged for these clicks from this or other similar tools if they exist? They claim to have 70 million users.

[smallcompany]

I only know that 404 errors are piling in my logs as that “thing” is not reading links well. 404s come with no referrer.

I guess I should call AdWords and ask about it (click charges). AVG is very popular and we can expect that trend to grow.

[Rehan]

I checked using a network analyzer (Ethereal), and LinkScanner accesses the destinations URLs directly without going through the AdWords links...so advertisers are not charged for clicks because of AVG.

[smallcompany]

Great news if true, and it should be as there is no referrer for those “clicks”.

Always doubtful and paranoid. ;)

[Kobayashi]

Great news indeed, thanks for checking Rehan.

[Philosopher]

Definitely good news. I'm now wondering how it handles the ppc links on MSN and Yahoo. Adwords actually seems to have the destination URL encoded into the link.

From what I can see, neither Yahoo or MSN do which means it would likely have to follow the redirect to get to the dest. URL.

[smallcompany]

Emailed Grisoft... We'll see if they reply. They say they're very busy about that new 8.0

[Rehan]

In case any of you missed it elsewhere on WebmasterWorld:
AVG Stops Real-Time Scanning [webmasterworld.com]

I've updated my test copy of AVG to version 8.0.138 and verified that it no longer visits the AdWords destination URLs. The traffic from the "1813" user agent has also gone down significantly, so it looks like most users have upgraded.