It is still your responsibility to monitor your web traffic and clicks, and report to google team if you find anything suspicious.

Since Jan 2011 my company loveandfriends.com has wasted £7k = c. $10,000 of Google “search partner network” ads that have delivered me practically no revenue and just a load of really low quality/fake/robot traffic. I’ve reported this to Google but they think the traffic is ‘fine’.

They won’t tell me what tests they’ve done or even what ‘partner search’ sites I was advertised on as it’s all ‘secret’. What possible legitimate reason can you have for not saying what sites we are paying to be on? If we – the customer – knew we’d be poking around on these sites and see what dodgy/fishy stuff was going on and be alerting google and wanting a refund. They don’t want that. Ignorance is bliss as far as Google is concerned. Loads of companies – big and small – chuck money at google and don’t do the analysis we did and so are still in ignorance I am sure.

People can use variations on the tricks you’ve mentioned and just be a bit more subtle/clever and they’ll get away with it. My experience is proof of this.

If I were so inclined I could hookup some modified clickBot software to a BOTNET of hacked computers and make $100k annually easy peasy. Actually I could blag $1million and get away with it I’m pretty sure. …but let’s not be too greedy $100k annually would slip under their radar.

I am sure Google will stop the simple scams …but ones that are a bit more subtle/clever will get through. Google don’t tell you this of course – is all hidden behind a wall of secrecy.

People have variously commented that click fraud is a $1 billion industry. Maybe they exaggerate and is only $500 million

Seriously, though. If ‘only’ say $100 million click fraud is done through Google – this makes Google $30 million extra pure profit as they rake in 30% commission of this.

Is similar to dating sites. On our dating site loveandfriends.com (nb free upgrade/membership for anyone that emails me andy@loveandfriends.com!) we take pride that we do everything possible to stop dating scammers. We stop the simple ones and the clever ones. One of two clever ones get through but we do really nail them eventually.

Not so all dating sites. It is actually profitable to let the clever scammers use your site – because they write endless emails to all the less attractive people and these people then pay the site to upgrade to write back. The point of the scammer is to get the victim to send them money but en route they trigger upgrades. Hence less ethical dating sites turn a blind eye to scammers. The dodgy dating sites make a big song and dance about stopping the (simple) scammers. They don’t mention that they know full well more sophisticated ones are successfully operating.

I have in the last 2 months sadly come to believe Google is basically acting like a “dodgy” dating site