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If you’re using AdWords or AdSense you must have heard about an emerging practice in the underworld of computing called “click fraud”. But what exactly is click fraud and how is it accomplished?

Well AdSense uses a payment mechanism that awards a particular amount of money to a publisher (someone who holds an AdSense banner on their page) every time a person clicks on the said banner. So click fraud is the attempt to have individuals clicking the ads just so that they can earn a greater income.

There are individuals setting up sites for the sole purpose of falsely generating revenue through Google’s AdSense program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through a lot of methods, some complex and sophisticated and some elementary and simple.

One of the most difficult is through the use of so called “hitbots”. These are automated programs who imitate clicking the links in AdSense banners (there are some that really click the banners as well).

Google’s AdSense security scheme is by no means ideal and nearly anyone can find the details of surmounting the protection mechanism, ironically just by doing a Google search.

A different, more elementary method is to hire a lot of individuals in a poor country to click the links on your site. This means these individuals will actually sit all day and just click links so you can earn a fortune. They come from very poor countries like India, and they’re prepared to do so for just $0.50 an hour.

Sure, there’s a trouble with this mechanism. Once Google receives a huge number of clicks from a single address, the address and the site that had the AdSense banner will be banned, and the illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued.

To prevent this from happening, a lot of individuals use a large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. These are basically trojans, located on computers throughout the world (though mostly in the US). What’s even more daunting is that these clicks will appear to originate from an actual computer so such scams are truly hard to discover.

And don’t think this happens only in isolated instances. There is a great deal of illegal activity in this domain.

As a matter of fact there’s so much that if search engine companies don’t increase their security with such programs as AdSense, such unlawful behavior could become more become even more damaging.

Google has a very strict policy regarding click fraud, and it has sued those employing such techniques in the past. But while the search engine giant tries its best to minimize the risk of click fraud there’s definitely room for a lot of improvement.

It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are just done in order to get money from the individual paying for the ad. Some people consider the number of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large.

There are a great deal more schemes involving click fraud, for instance groups of AdSense publishers clicking each other’s links (which is referred to as “clicking rings”, or spamming individuals so that they click such links.

Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is definitely raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but in spite of this advertising with Google’s AdSense still remains more lucrative for the advertiser, as opposed to traditional untargeted advertising schemes.

There are some means of security against such schemes and all advertisers should be knowledge enough to utilize them. Lots of advertisers prefer to keep away from the content network all together for fear of click fraud.

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