Posted: Fri May 21, 2004 10:25 pm Post subject: Adsense click spam?
Hello dear mates,
I’m really kind of out of my mood due to what’s happening to me.
To start from the beginning it was about 2 months ago, when I began to notice a large increase in the Adsense CTR (up to 2 times the old one). When I saw this change persisted in the long run (more than a week), I was definitely worried. When the ctr went up to e.g. 20% a few times, I knew almost sure there could something wrong. I removed the Adsense code from all of my pages and looked for a click tracker script.
In about 2 weeks I reinserted the Adsense code and set up the tracking script. Interestingly enough my measured ctr (both the official and that calculated from the counted clicks) was the one I knew (the average one for several months). I was happy that everything is ok. Sometimes though I saw large number of clicks from one IP (up to 20).
However, a few days ago, after about a month from when I reinserted the script, looking to my click reports I saw large number of clicks (about 20) from 1-2 IP’s a day. I knew this can occur naturally a few times. However, these clicks actually persisted.
To my desperation looking at my tracking script today I saw 64 clicks from one ip in 2 “sessions” of a few seconds to different ads; respectively 8 and 34clicks from another 2 ips.
The “64 ip” is from India and it does not appear to be a proxy(there is no output on google for it, which is strange). The “8 ip” is from Romania (I’m also from Romania) and the “34ip” is from India again (and I didn’t find it as a proxy on google).
It’s also interesting I have another 2 clicks from another Romanian ip today (and I get about 1 Romanian visitor in a few days on average).
All these strange clicks are within 7 AM and 16 PM today.
The strange clicks (not so numerous) from the days before are from: one Pakistani ip(18 clicks, I actually found messages on forums for that ip: e.g. World Islamic Mission - Forum), one from India (57 clicks! I can find forum posts related to that ip) a “Brunei Darussalem” ip(about 30 clicks)
and some other countries with fewer clicks.
Hmm, I think it’s fairly possible that someone (maybe some people) is trying to boot me out of Adsense.
I’m kind of sad when I realize that people may be capable to do these kinds of things.
Fortunately for me only one click from a unique IP is counted at Adsense, so those attacks today only count for 3 clicks. However, obviously all clicks are tracked and I’m actually in danger of loosing my Adsense account!
I’m considering the removing the Adsense code from my site (or taking the site down), and I wonder if I should send a letter to the Adsense support too to explain this situation to them. Please tell your opinion regarding this and the whole matter.
There is still a very slight chance that those clicks could be explained by objective reasons, but as I’ve said I’m not confident that is the case.
Tough call.
AdSense ads are geotargeted,so the vistors to your site should be seeing ads that might be of interest to them. However,the ads should also be related to the content of your site.
Question:
would your site be of interest to people in those areas?
Check your logs,to find out how they got to your site.
Joined: 13 Oct 2003 Posts: 68 Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Posted: Sat May 22, 2004 7:42 am Post subject:
Steve,
You should definitely contact Google. Some time ago I also had an unusual great increase in CTR. I wrote Google immediately and received a very kind reply telling me not to worry.
Thanks for all of you. Your comments are greatly appreciated.
As I further looked at my tracker stats I concluded that those clicks are definitely not from a single PC and taking in account the different location of the IPs, those clicks aren't made by the same person either. Now it's possible sometimes that a visitor would click multiple times in good faith on an ad (e.g. the site doesn't load because it's down).
I think some of my clicks are of this kind. However the clicks from India respectively Pakistan are often on different ads and anyway my site isn't targeted to those visitors.
So I would kind of doubt about good faith there. I think there are lots of strange people, and for them this could be a usual practice. My website doesn’t have any political flavor, neither it contains anything offensive (it’s a greetings site). Most webmasters probably don't have a tracking script or even if they have, they don't follow clicks so strictly as I did. I suppose that’s why I'm the only one who seems to notice this kind of behavior.
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