If you use AdWords or Adsense on your websites you probably heard about the illegal practice in the underworld of the internet called "click fraud". Click fraud, what is it, and how is it accomplished? Dense uses a payment method that pays out a certain amount of money to a publisher which is a person that places a Dense banner on their webpage, and every time a web surfer clicks on the said banner the publisher makes money. So click fraud is an attempt to have web surfers clicking these Adsense ads just so publishers can earn a greater income from their webpages. There are webmasters designing websites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating money through Google's Dense program. The methods they use range from complex and sophisticated to some rudimentary and simple, and achieve an incredible number of clicks. The most complex is something called "hitbots". They are automated programs that emulate clicking the links in Adsense banners, and some actually click the banners themselves. Google's Adsense protection scheme is not perfect and anyone can find details on the internet to get around their protection mechanism, ironically just by using Google in a search for the solution. A more rudimentary method of click fraud is to hire many web surfers in poor countries to click the links on your websites. These web surfers will actually sit in front of their computers all day long and just click your links so you can earn a small fortune. India is one of the poor countries where webmasters find these web surfers, and they are prepared to do the clicking for just $0.50 an hour. There is a problem with this method, if Google gets a large number of clicks from a single IP address, the IP address and the website that had the Adsense banner on it will be banned, and even get the fraudster sued. To get around this, many web surfers will use a large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. Proxy servers allow you to surf the internet in stealth mode. They are basically trojans, and located on computers all over the world, though a lot are in the United States. What is daunting about this are that these clicks will appear to originate from an actual computer so these scams are hard to detect. This type of click fraud does not happen only in isolated instances. In fact, there is so much click fraud that if search engine companies do not increase their security with such programs as Adsense, such criminal behavior could become even more damaging, and destroy the whole adsense business. Google has sued those employing such techniques, and has a very strict policy regarding click fraud. Although, this search engine giant tries hard to minimize the risk of click fraud there is certainly lots of room for a lot of improvement. An estimated 20 percent of the clicks on Adsense links are just done in order to get cash from the people paying for the Adsense ad. Some estimates put the numbers of fraudulent clicks even higher as much as 40 percent. There is a lot more schemes out there involving click fraud, including groups of Adsense publishers clicking each other's links. This method of click fraud is referred to as "clicking rings", or spamming people so that they will click these links. Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is certainly raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this advertising with Google's Adsense still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as opposed to traditional untargeted advertising schemes. There are some means of protection against such schemes and all advertisers should be savvy enough to employ them. Many advertisers choose to avoid the content network all together for fear of click fraud.
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