You must be thinking now whats that ! What do the two have together other than keeping a lot of people up at night? “Buy Viagra” is one of the hottest keywords as far as Google AdSense money goes. A site hosting Viagra ads can rake in $10 to $35 per click through Google AdSense.
Many SEO and SEM professionals use Viagra type keywords to gauge Google organic SERP’s. There are many legitimate websites getting beaten out of hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars a day by publisher click fraud.
The search world often gauges terms related to Viagra due to its popularity in worldwide searches as well as the high price that it brings to publishers.
Recently a blogger showed “How Publisher Click Fraud Is A Million Dollar Industry”.
He stated ” I put some money into my AdWords account and bid on some low-cost keywords about data backup and put up a one-page wonder sub domain site called crash recovery systems and used some scripts I downloaded off the Internet that allowed me to put 6 Google Ad boxes along with bogus text about disaster recovery I blatantly scraped from another site.
That is the first part of publisher click fraud. Taking a webpage and putting on more than 2 allowed ad units and spoofing the AdWords server into serving high cost text ads that have nothing to do with the domain. These are in direct conflict with Google’s Terms and Conditions:
The next thing I did was go onto my Kubuntu machine and loaded Ice Weasel (this is another name for FireFox) that uses a proxy server that utilizes .edu domains. I went to the site and clicked on MY ad. I then quickly chose another server in the list, refreshed my browser, cleared the cookies and went back to the site and clicked the ad again. The whole process took less than a minute.
I did this a few times then went into my AdSense account ad saw that I had made $16.00 at 12 cents per click on the text clicks and 19 cents by using the search box and clicking on my ad in the SERP’s. In fact the search AdSense is even easier to spoof because you are going through yet another interface. By setting up multiple entry points I could have done this all day long and wracked up a hundred or so dollars on a 12 cent click. This can be done to the extreme on personal injury lawyers sites, Viagra and pharmaceutical sites to bring in even more profit.”
There is only one way to eliminate publisher click fraud. Google MUST remove doorway and ad-only sites. Going back to the Viagra example, a search for “Viagra” yields these results.