Hi Brad,
You are a highly respected authority on seo. I think you could make a TON of money by protecting us little guys from click fraud. Can your scientific mind be put to such a use?
Here is my story: On an average $20 a day of ppc at Yahoo, in the quit smoking KW silo, $16 of it is click fraud from redirects, parked domains and adsense arbitrage sites, run by this company Quantcast.com according to my logs. The same websites click on my ad, yet don't opt in. And I normally get a very good opt in rate of about 15 to 20%.
The chronology: Oct 2009
I was getting a lot of click fraud on my Yahoo search marketing. Clicks not from searches, but from all these "nonsense" names sites, like stopglorify.info, http://www.qualityconformist.com, etc.etc.
I researched logs and it shows redirects from this company QuantCast.com, a data-mining company.
The clicks I am recieving from these nonsense sites, are because quantcast.com set up all these "parked domain" mini-search engines that are ONLY linked to adsense/yahoo sponsered search sites.
So I am getting clicks from these no-content sites, sites filled with nothing but adsense arbitrage ads, that are no content al all, just pages filled with 100% links to Adwords ads.
Nonsense sites names Examples:
~ http://www.qualityconformist.com
~ http://www.stopglorify.info
~ http://www.sephalo.com
~ http://www.marketplacegains.com ...etc.
They have search bars, for their "paid clickers" to search a keyword, which then redirects to these adsense sites. So when you search for a keyword on these nonsense sites (above), in , for example: quit smoking, you notice a redirect to quantcast, which then brings you to one of their pages with 100% adsense links.
They then click on my (and others advertisers) ads, which cost me up to 95 cents each, some go for as high as $2.15 a click
Now, the owners of these adsense sites can go in, using these Quantcast.com redirects, and self-click on my ads to make adsense revenue all day. At min .80 cents to 95 cents a click. (Their adsense revenue is a % of that)
But when they put up zillions of these adsense sites in Keyword silos -- like quit smoking -- and bang us advertisers all day with these fake clicks. It uses up $16 out of 20 bucks spend per day.
(whois shows some sites are registered to ns1. parkingspa.com.)
I have had to stop advertising on Yahoo PPC.
Part II
Just yesterday, as a long time advertiser on yahoo in the past, I recieved a notice in the mail of class action lawsuit, levied towards Yahoo for this parked domain and arbitrage sites click fraud stuff. And what do you know? The guy at yahoo who was responsible for this click fraud stuff, Todd Teresi, who was pushed out of yahoo.com (due to this click fraud class action lawsuit) is now a Chief revenue Officer at Quantcast!
I guess he is up to his old tricks that he used for click fraud at Yahoo.com, to use those tricks at quantcast.com.
His work at Yahoo Sponsored search resulted in this class action lawsuit here: http://www.inreyahoosettlement.com
The management team of Quantcast includes alumnus from Fortent, Orbital Data and Transium, some serious research companies. a who's who of cyber criminal minds.
What resource can we use to protect ourselves against these determined sophisticated data miners who have created an embedded click-fraud empire?
Hiring paid "clickers" to use Quantcasts mini "search engines" (to conceal their path from a Quantcast redirect property), so they can click on pricey adsense/Adwords is criminal to me. I won't even use yahoo, till I figure a way to avoid this.
They give you 500 URL's you can block, but there are inumerable of these adsense pages sites.
Your thoughts? Any product out there we can use or you can design? to combat this business-destroying click fraud issue.
Regards,
Larry
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