Now here is a classic click fraud symptom. This user at 172.24.6.31 used a proxy server at a Level3 site 65.57.245.11 in San Francisco to find four of our ads and click them within seconds.
Update: The “cuplrit” was Google. Apparently the Adwords people use this IP address when checking your ads. 🙂 The official answer from Google about these clicks was some boilerplate answer which said how wonderful their system is, but nothing specific.
Øystein Halseth Lund has a great site that features click fraud – how people commit it and what the SEs are doing about it. Well worth a read!
In this post and in a followup, John Cunningham writes about his experiences with Kanoodle.
This Bellsouth user in Chattanooga, TN, just loves to click – 11 times, no less. He didn’t buy any calendars after all that. Google only charged me one click, which could have been for someone else.
CMS Products has done it again. The ABSmini is an external USB 2.0 backup drive that fits in a shirt pocket or the palm of one’s hand. The review unit has a storage capacity of 40 GB, although 20 GB and 60 GB units are also available. A small vinyl tote bag protects it from scratches if you were to carry it in your laptop bag or briefcase.
No external power is required, but a second USB plug is provided if you need to get extra power from your PC or powered hub. I did not need one while using the ABSmini with my desktop PC. The installation CD-ROM is in the CD Mini form factor, which could be a problem if you have one of those rare “slot” drives (as opposed to the usual “tray” type). The CD-ROM includes installation guides for the drive and the software.
The drive works with Windows 98 through Windows XP and Macintosh OS X 10.2.6 or greater. The copy2go-Xpress software requires Windows 2000 or XP.
I was wondering why one would want such a small backup drive, but having just been “upgraded” at work from a desktop to a miniature Dell notebook, I could see the convenience of carrying the ABSmini in the same computer bag.
copy2go-Xpress
copy2go-Xpress is a special search and copy program for managing photo, music and video files. It will find all such files on your PC and then present them for you to transfer to the ABSmini for backup or to a portable device such as an MP3 player or digital camera. Most of the common file extensions are handled.
BounceBack Express
I mentioned BounceBack Express in the recent review of ABS-Backup – it is the backup and restore software that is bundled with the drive. For my test I backed up my entire PC, which amounted to 19.1 GB of files. This took only 1.5 hours and the backup speed was 219 MB per minute over the USB2 connection. It seems not that long ago when I used backup tape and it took hours to back up a lot less.
Availability
For more information, please visit the CMS Products Inc Web site: http://www.cmsproducts.com. The local distributor is Elantra: http://www.elantra.com.au and pricing starts at $385.
I am seeing such click behaviour daily and cannot make up my mind whether this is fraud or a novice web user. Unless I were to see someone clicking an ad several times to return to an advertiser’s site, I won’t be able to ask them why they do that.
My fellow Webmasterworld member JenStar runs the best known AdSense site that I know of. Here is an inspirational interview with the man who has over 80 blogs and makes over $1M a year from AdSense. He has 9 staff and over 100 blog writers…
(Extract)
TEXARKANA, Ark. (AP) – A federal appeals court says a class-action lawsuit alleging “click fraud” by Google Inc. and other Internet companies should be heard in state court rather than in a federal courtroom.
I don’t know much about the US legal system, but wouldn’t it make life easier for all concerned if there was one ruling that applied to all of the US?
I also track my sites with VeriClix, a free service. Someone’s clock is out of sync, because the visit from the Comcast subscriber shows only once at Vericlix, but a few minutes out, so I cannot say which of the four clicks it is.
I hate to admit it, but you have to give credit where it is due. I have been following just one keyword but it may apply to others. Google has only charged me for one click in the past 7 days when the suspicious clicks for that keyword are at least 10 to 15.
I think I know what click behaviour is ignored by the Adwords software (i.e. not charged to the advertiser) but I am not going to spell it out here.
I hate to admit it, but you have to give credit where it is due. I have been following just one keyword but it may apply to others. Google has only charged me for one click in the past 7 days when the suspicious clicks for that keyword are at least 10 to 15.
I think I know what click behaviour is ignored by the Adwords software (i.e. not charged to the advertiser) but I am not going to spell it out here.
What is it with Arrow Sheds? They’re probably OK, if you are into sheds, but these “arrow shed” searchers just like to click my ads but they don’t buy anything. This Comcast visitor from Nashua, NH is a good example of the 2-3 daily clickers who visit my site every day. At least he made an effort to click deep into the site before going back to the Google SERP and clicking the ad four times.