Click fraud is the act of clicking on ads for the purpose of  falsely acquiring income from advertisers.  It’s equivalent to paying in cash for false leads. Click fraud is a breach of the Google Adsense Terms of Service.

clickfraudfool

Click fraud is  a fools’ game

Clicking on your friend’s blog advertising for them and/or forming a click fraud community, and expecting that you will not be detected is stupid.  When you get caught you will be banned and blacklisted.

How to report click fraud

If you know a publisher engaging in click fraud and generating invalid clicks, you can now report the publisher by going to his or her site, clicking on the “Ads by Google” and including “invalid clicks” in the comment field. You can remain anonymous, or include your email address when you submit it.

Google is specifically targeting invalid clicks, such as click bots, click rings, “hired to click”, etc.

Advertisers who track fraudulently generated clicks to a single publisher should also be able to report this way (although you should also go through the AdWords report method as well). Reference

Reporting publishers for click fraud will result in their accounts being banned and them being blacklisted.

Some webmasters use Google Adsense to generate 100% of their website income and the account may hold many different websites. In that case, every website is disabled at one time. An automatic disqualification can be devastating, especially when Google has no obligation to explain its decision in detail so read the contract! Not only does the account become disabled, but also existing click-through earnings are refunded back to the advertisers.

Is it that easy to get an account banned? Yes it is. The terms of service every Google Adsense Webmaster accepts, clearly describes the easy do’s and don’ts.

  • Do use the Adsense approved formats only.
  • Do keep your click-through data and income private.
  • Don’t display Adsense on registration or thank you pages.
  • Don’t use Adsense code and a competitor’s content-targeted advertisement on the same page.
  • Don’t encourage anyone else to click on ads.

For a complete list, read the Adsense policies and terms.

The easiest method an account can be banned is by a webmaster clicking on the site’s own ads. Just how many click-throughs are needed to get a site banned isn’t exposed for obvious reasons, but Google Adsense watches for multiple clicks from the same domain.  Spikes in click-through percentages are red flags. A site that rises from a consistent 1% click-through rate to a 10% click-through rate rapidly could become suspect. The actual percentage that creates the flag isn’t made public for obvious reasons.

What’s the safest way to protect an account?
Don’t click on the site’s own ads ever.

Deceptive practices work for a short time, but they always come back to hurt the originator.