Archive: January, 2009

It being said that Google and other search engines are sensitive to maintaining advertiser’s confidence is a start, or a move in the right direction, but at the time of Google’s IPO offering, 95% of their revenue stream came from Pay Per Click advertising. Today, a sense of urgency is quickly developing in all of the legitimate search engine companies as they continue to throw resources and algorithms at the growing problem of click fraud. As just one example, Google has charged entire teams of investigators and R & D with the task of safeguarding their reputation – even going so far as to saying that they are committed to issuing refund checks for cases of verifiable fraud.

But like a virus that can morph into superbugs, the perpetrators of click fraud are evolving their sinister craft by developing new weapons like impression fraud, a method for creating false page impressions for the purpose of wasting a competitor’s advertising budget. Pages and search results are artificially inflated and sold to a competitor so that they back the wrong horse while your client gets sole access to the real results. In order to make the fake impressions seem legitimate, search engine hijackers even sacrifice their own click-through numbers by temporarily suspending their own campaigns during the times of the attacks.