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Tuesday, December 12, 2006 |
John Marshall of ClickTracks says that there are two fundamental types of click fraud and that most harbor misconceptions about each. At Chicago's Search Engine Strategies, WebProNews took a moment out to discuss this and other issues with Marshall.
Editor's Note: Click fraud is an acknowledged threat against the
success of Pay-Per-Click marketing. However, just how prevelant is it? ClickTracks'
John Marshall sits down with and discusses it with us. View the video at WebProNews.
Type one happens on search results page. In this scenario a childish competitor
clicks
your ads, ad infinitum, until they've run out your budget, effectively removing
your presence. Type two happens on a publisher's site. Here, someone builds a
site, populates it with ads, then employs a bot net to click ads and raise a profit
at the advertiser's expense.
Contrary to popular belief, type one is much more rare. According to Marshall,
rule one of click fraud inoculation is, "follow the money." When that trail is
blazed, surely we'll corner our fraud but (in some scenarios) wouldn't search
engines stand to benefit? Google gets a portion of click pays in the same manner
as the publisher. Is there an incentive in such cases for search engine's to battle
click fraud?
Marshall think so. "In the end, it irritates advertisers like you wouldn't believe!"
Thus, it stands to reason that (as their major source of income) search engines
would like to keep them happy.
On the issue of progression within the battle on click
fraud, Marshall points out our inequities and strengths, "There's a fundamental
problem… in that completely automated techniques to detect this are extremely
difficult to develop. Since there's a financial incentive on the part of click
fraud perpetuator to make it happen. You have an arms race where any automated
technique that you have ends up being defeated. It's impossible for engines to
completely rein in and detect this. There's a certain amount that advertisers
MUST do… (they) should be looking at the data."
Even though it's an unpopular theory, Marshall believes that no fully automated
system will ever succeed… it's the warning systems and human intervention which
will make for a
better solution to click fraud.
About
the Author:
Charlie Campbell is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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Yahoo, Google Bloggers Snipe Over Copying
 By
David Utter
Staff Writer | WebProNews
It's a meltdown of PageRank 9 proportions, as Jeremy Zawodny and Matt Cutts (of
Yahoo and Google, respectively, but you knew that) took shots at each other's
corporate masters over strikingly similar pages touting Microsoft's Internet Explorer
7.
The barbs first flew from Zawodny's blog,
where he pointed out the page Yahoo created to promote a Yahoo-optimized IE7 distribution
had been copied by Google:
Was some product marketing person so uninspired that he or she decided it was "good enough" to just copy us?
Seriously, click those images and look at the full-sized versions. They're remarkably similar. And I've checked with our PR group to make sure that this wasn't just a template that Microsoft gave to all partners. It's not.
A few hours later, Zawodny updated his blog to note how Google had made some changes to look less like Yahoo's effort now. Perhaps there were some private mea culpas exchanged, and life goes on.
Or not.
Cutts decided that if Yahoo needed to extract a pound of flesh over this, then maybe the blogosphere needed a refresher on some of Yahoo's transgressions.
About
the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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Dealing With Google UK
Does the Google UK algorithm give you problems? There have been reports of sites
being kicked (index-wise) for being hosted in the UK without the proper extension.
However, a post in WebProWorld magnifies some of the things that have been going
on with Google's UK offering. Check it out and see if you can offer some assistance.
Subscribe
to the WebProWorld Feed 
|| Chris||
Google.co.uk
Goes Haywire
I never felt I would hear myself saying this. But the behaviour of the Google.co.uk
algorithm gets more bemusing by the day. I've just checked out a client's competitor
dot.com hosted in the UK. The client is also a UK hosted dot.com and since 20th
November his home page has been delisted from the Google.co.uk "pages from the
UK" index.
What I've spotted is a competitor, also a UK hosted dot.com, that goes in and out of the same index. As a consequence, sometimes this site is listed in the "UK only" SERPs and at other times its excluded.
As at 8th December, according to the Google cache, the competitor site was last indexed on 27th November.
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The Battle Against
Spam Blogs
 In the new boom, trends fit new philosophy. Call it Web 2.0, call it whatever you want but it all boils down to users. Suddenly, everything is about US - about sharing photos with our friends, about blogging our thoughts, about “digging” our favorite news. |
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