Watch out for major PPC scam sites! Taking your money!

Hello SEO Chat,

I had a good look at my Google Analytics for the past few months - at the "referring" sites to my website. Shock, Horror at all the scam sites referring/ scamming my money! I had my content network turned off on Adwords for a long time so it is the neglected Yahoo PPC that perhaps is the focus of this thread.

My site ranks on page 1 on Yahoo for my keywords (mostly page 1 for Google as well).

Some details of referring sites:

directinfos dot com had twice as many clicks as my Yahoo organic - shock horror! You go to this site and it looks like a directory but you can not look up anything there because there is no information to look up! So I don't suspect any visitors are clicking on this site - then who is "clicking" on my ads?

abcjmp dot com. Shock horror! half the number of the clicks as my Yahoo organic. This site does not even show any ads ! ! !

Ecocho dot net. Shock horror! 1/4 number of clicks as on Yahoo organic. This is just a clone of Google/Yahoo - absolutely no value added.

toppropose dot com. A few clicks from this site. There is nothing on this site but a box to enter keywords. How is anyone going to find this site?

I suspect major major click fraud here. abcjmp does not display ads/links so how is it then referring to my site. How do I get charged for clicks here?

Google/Yahoo really needs to clean up on these rubbish scam sites. If someone stole money from your bank account then there are laws against it and they should be prosecuted. It happens on PPC - but what is happening? Yet I hear Google makes 30% of revenue from Adsense - so their interest is to do nothing - while also claiming sophistication in anticlickfraud.

*One big question I have relating to clicks from these junk sites - is Google/Yahoo organic ranking my site down for clicks from them?

What can we do?
I don't have all the answers on this but-
*Turn off content matching
*Monitor your analytics and block the sites in Adwords/Yahoo PCC for scam sites who have referred to you (Google/Yahoo shame on you for putting your customers in this position).

GAustralia

I have just cancelled my account with them. It is thieving - plain and simple.

Hello Drainsmith-

I agree with you Drainsmith - Yahoo PPC is the worst (worse than Google, in my opinion)at allowing the stealing of your money by, in my opinion, fradulent means. I had 313 "clicks" from Yahoo PPC in March - up over triple from a few months ago. My bids were the same. Yet the enquiry rate did not triple in that time. In all my customer contact with customers no one said that they found us via Yahoo/MSN.

All those sites I refer to when I started this thread I believe are with the Yahoo conent network. Google likes to talk about anticlickfraud, but when there is the allowance of putting ads on junk websites then the anticlick fraud is certainly very limited. And this allowance of putting PPC on junk websites is certainly encouraging click fraud and fraud in general.

I have not heard anything from Yahoo about anticlickfraud. Yahoo should do the right "thing" by the customer and shut down/disallow the junk sites - with no content/very limited content - whos only purpose it appears to be to steal money including by generating the clicks themselves - in my opinion. Some of the sites are so junk I don't see how any surfer could get to them.

If you have PPC you really need Google Analytics up and you will really see where the "referals" are coming from and costing you.

I am majorly upset with Yahoo PCC. I asked for a large refund of illegitimate PPC (the majority of what I had been charged over the past 18 months). They sent me an e-mail about tracking conversions. While that is interesting, they did not give me a refund, nor did they say they would limit the scamming websites that feature Yahoo PPC.

There is a lot of focus on "trust" on the web and building sites/links that help your trust ranking. Yahoo has busted the trust and hopefully the market will severley penalise them - and hopefully Google will get a hint to tighten their regulations on the trust factor of the sites they allow their Adsense on to. While a Google motto is "do no evil" fraud is evil and having lax regulation on what sites show your PPC is, in my opinion, assisting the occurance of fraud.

GAustralia

It is always a good idea to keep an eye on your logs for click fraud. However the existence of click fraud does not make Yahoo search marketing a scam. I can confirm that while their traffic does not convert as well as adwords for my company we track all traffic strait through to sales dollars and Yahoo does provide me with a positive ROI.

MIVA OTOH provided me with traffic that never converted... so I shut off our account there. I won't say the company is a fraud. They may convert for other people in a different industry.

The key is to test/monitor your PPC traffic and report click fraud when you find it (IIRC there is a way to submit fraud sites etc. in all the major PPC engines).

Click fraud is also far more prevalent in some industries than in others (ie. some key words vs. others)

Google is supposed to be having anti click fraud detection mechanism but I am not sure how far they follow that procedure.

Re: Google anticlick fraud.

Don't let them fool you with this anticlickfraud talk. Google trys to divert attention to PPC with Google Search, and away from all the junk sites they allow under Adsense. For many of these sites their only purpose is Adsense click revenue. No/minimal content - crap. [Side story, I was signed up with linkmarket and one day I got over a dozen link requests for junk websites - all look the same, all from the same person, all PR 0, different target keywords, heavy emphasis on PPC - Junk Junk and more Junk - linkmarket is facilitating junk and I let them know it.] Therefore, with lax control by Google who they allow to show the ads, you then have many more interested parties - an exponential increase in the number of parties - with a financial interest in conducting click fraud.

As mentioned, in my opinion, Yahoo is the worst. Reality Hack - do you have your content network turned off? Do you use something like Google Analytics to look for junk "referal" sites? Please state the amount of revenue you gain from PPC payments from Yahoo/Google - direct payments to you from Google/Yahoo. Just to make it all clear.

As I say, Yahoo is worst with apparently NO regulation over who their PPC "partners" are. I am not sorry for them in that they appear to be going down the financial gurgler as they have so been bad in not looking after the interests of their PPC customers.

I like Yahoo Finance and other Yahoo sites. However, I believe, in my opinion, that they have facilitated fraud against my company in allowing these junk websites to carry their ads. I asked nicely for a refund and also with the promise that if they did not refund then I would rubish them [as they deserve] on SEO forum.

GAustralia

No I have content match turned on. However I might as well have it off as we get vertically no traffic from content match.
I would rather not discuss our revenue figures but I can give you an idea of our ad spend and tell you that it results in positive ROI for us.
On yahoo search marketing approx. $1,500 in the last 30 days < $20 from content match.
We use webtrends analytics software to monitor traffic and track conversions. We track to actual revenue generated.

In my experience yahoo traffic does not convert as well as google traffic but I have seen people post the opposite so I think it may depend upon the industry you are in.

As a side note. When we did some testing we found that if we included multiple tracking tags (ie. webtrends + google + yahoo) on our conversion page for tracking none of them would fire reliably. It may have been a load time issue we couldn't track it down but using only the webtrends tag we got near perfect accuracy.

ETA: I imagine the industry / keywords you are using highly affect the amount of content network traffic you get.

I will agree to everything. Though I do not doubt the facts from GAustralia but more introspection might be needed and you could probably try to contact local Google / Yahoo support. Rightly said - "Click fraud is more prevalent in some industries than in others".