Well AdSense utilizes a payment mechanism that awards a certain cost to a publisher (someone that holds an AdSense banner on their page) when a person clicks on the said banner. So click fraud may be the attempt to have people clicking the ads just so they can earn a greater income.
You can find people setting up sites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating revenue through Google's AdSense program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through many methods, some complex and sophisticated and some rudimentary and simple.
The most complex is through using so called "hitbots". These are generally automated programs who emulate clicking the links in AdSense banners (there are many that actually click the banners as well).
Google's AdSense protection scheme is by no means perfect and nearly anyone can find information of surmounting the protection mechanism, ironically just by doing a Google search.
Another, more rudimentary method is to hire a lot of people in a poor country to click on the links on your site. Therefore these people will actually sit all day and just click links so you can generate a fortune. They are derived from very poor countries like India, and they're prepared to accomplish that for just $0.50 an hour.
Obviously, there's a problem using this mechanism. Once Google receives a large variety of clicks from a single address, the address and the site that had the AdSense banner will likely be banned, and the illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued.
To prevent this from happening, many people work with a large number of proxy servers for the intention of clicking. These are basically trojans, located on computers throughout the planet (though mostly in the usa). What's even more daunting is that these clicks will seem to originate from an actual computer so such scams are hard to detect.
And don't think this happens only in isolated instances. There's a great deal of illegal activity in this domain.
In fact there's so much that if internet search engine companies don't increase their security with such programs as AdSense, such criminal behavior could become more become even more damaging.
Google includes a very strict policy regarding click fraud, and possesses sued those employing such techniques in the past. But while the google search giant tries its far better minimize the risk of click fraud there's certainly room for a number of improvement.
It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are just carried out order to get money from the person paying for the ad. Some people believe the quantity of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large.
A few great deal more schemes involving click fraud, such as groups of AdSense publishers clicking each other's links (which is called "clicking rings", or spamming people so that they can click such links.
Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is unquestionably raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this advertising with Google's AdSense still remains more profitable to the advertiser, as opposed to traditional untargeted advertising schemes.
There are several means of protection against such schemes and advertisers should be savvy enough to utilize them. Many advertisers choose to avoid the content network completely for fear of click fraud.
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