Click Fraud and Search Engine Marketing
Click Fraud and Search Engine Marketing Published by PPC-List.com
Whether it be an overanxious affiliate of a pay per click search
engine, or the search engine itself, if you have participated in
search engine marketing you have most likely found yourself to
be the victim of click fraud, whether you know it or not. Click
fraud is tainting the image of many pay per click search engines
and costing advertisers far too much money. Although the
negative effects of click fraud are obvious to both advertisers
and pay per click search engines, many engines do not take the
necessary steps to curb click fraud. The result is that you are
losing money
Types of Click Fraud
Forced Traffic and Robot Traffic
The most egregious form of click fraud comes from forced
traffic. Utilizing pop-ups, start page exchanges, and other mass
traffic generation tools, the person committing the fraud forces
traffic through paid listings. For example, if the person
committing click fraud were to use pop-ups, rather than have a
pop-up display the content of an ad, the pop-up is used deliver
a visitor to the click URL that the engine uses to track
traffic. The search engine does not know that the click was not
user generated, but rather generated by a pop-up. As a result
the search engine deducts money from the advertiser