Click Fraud Sites

[iShopHQ]

How does YSM get away with this?

www.cheapcomforters.com

All this site is doing is reserving YSM results. Click on Cheap Flights to New York in the left nav. Now go to Overture.com and do a search for 'cheap flights to new york'

Exact match. Not one lick of original content on the CheapComforters site.

And check this out:
http://onlinecareerdirectory.com/

EVERY link on this page points to a site that does noting but regurgitate overture results.

I used to run across sites like this ALL the time when I was the PPC manager for a marketing company I used to work for. We submitted fraud complaint after fraud complaint to YSM and never got a dime refunded.

On one of the campaigns I ran, a site like this was sending over $20 A DAY in clicks. When Y refused to refund even after we sent them copis of our server logs, we shut down the campaign. Site was:

http://www.recipes.com/

Click around and check out the results. This site is so blatant is passes the actual search term in the query string! Type a sarch term in the URL and see what you get.

Better yet: go to google and type in 'healthy recipes'. Chek the AdWords. They are advertising to send clicks to this site - a site without one word of original content!

The three sites linked on the page are exactely the same: cook.com, dress.om, and cards.com

Here: this page leads to a whole network of sites that are regurgitated Overture results: http://onlineemploymentguide.com/

These sites are perpetrating blatant theft. How does Yahoo get away with this? Better yet, how to get the word out to people paying YSM money for clicks from these sites!

I'd be willing to wager that many these sites are being crawled and the bot clicks are being charged!

F*** this sh** pisses me off!

[kthor]

LOL - they have sites like that in google too, not just yahoo. I have to agree it's bad business. but good for google and yahoo since they make money.
remember they have investor to make happy..the difference in stocks going up 20% could be a few bucks earnings.

[Mia]

Get away with what? They are not Google links. I guess you would have to look at the TOS of the affiliate linking service they are using to determine if it is wrong.

[iowadawg]

Wrong with having a search engine page or site like those.
Just another way for someone to make money providing a nice service.

[Fahd]

There's nothing illegal in what they are doing. Deceptive? Maybe!

Now for those sites owned by DigiMedia (http://www.digimedia.com) like recipes.com, cook.com, etc, those are hardly even deceptive! They have a great portfolio of domains they are using as parking/search pages.

[iShopHQ]

I guess I'm taking the view of the advertiser, not the site owner. I don't want my PPC ads showing on sites like the recipes site. I know from experience that clicks from sites such as those convert at a MUCH lower rate than those clicks that comes from a search results page.

Sure, I've run profitable campaigns in Overture, but I wonder how much MORE profitable thaty could have been withough 20-40% of the clicks coming from sites such as these.

Click fraund? No. Deceptive? Yes.

If sites such as these are so OK, why doesn't Yahoo list them as distriburion partners? Or give advertisers an option to opt-out from having their ads shown on sites like these?