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.

Other methods of click fraud include automated and artificial click generation. The later is perhaps the most difficult to identify because it is produced by the hands of manually generated clicks in the pay of competitors playing in a highly contested keyword bracket. Automated clicking methods employ software apps called hitbots which are specifically designed to click paid listings like rapid fiends. These hitbots also feature slick coding that allows them to slip past the internal filtering methods used by the best Pay Per Click engines.

So, how do you stop, or even put a cramp in, click fraud? The unfortunate truth at this point in time is that the advertiser must do his own due-diligence and build a body of proof to identify click fraud and demand a refund. This is not an attempt to scare would-be advertisers from the online version of the marketing game, but instead it is an invitation to play in the lucrative (although admittedly smaller) percentile of legitimate online commerce, but you must be aware that there are sharks in the water – has that ever stopped a surfer? You can protect yourself though by auditing your logs for suspicious activity, and keeping a keen eye on the conduct of your competitors. Think about it this way – each time you use your credit card to pay for a new pair of shoes or a fancy meal, do you stop to think about how identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the US? No, but it’s now second nature for you to check your monthly statement because identity theft could happen to you.