Click Fraud - Adsense Bowling

Just finished reading an interesting and scary article about Adsense Bowling. This is the practice of deliberately trying to get a competitor kicked off the adsense program and have their account closed. A quick search on the web definitely shows that this seems to be happening to a lot of people and I can see that it would be very difficult for Google to control. Adsense is just a chunk of code that could be lifted from any page displaying it and easily misused.

I suppose they will be using some of the same tactics that they use to fight click fraud on Google Adwords but they have always been pretty vague about what techniques are used. I’ve read a few interesting articles which are listed here

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/30/google_click_fraud_lawsuit/
• http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3503376
• http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/03/about-invalid-clicks.html

The adwords blog disputes the 30% fraud stat but The Register article lists fraud as accounting for between 10-20% of clicks and it’s scary to think that this could well be true. For every £1000 spent on adwords, £200 of it could be going to people who are defrauding the system and have no intention of buying your products.

As this scales up it’s hard to see how Google are going to stay on top of it and I wonder if advertisers will eventually begin to turn their back on PPC unless it can be controlled.