Google DOES look at click fraud

I've seen many people here minimize the feedback webmasters can give to Google about people breaking the TOS. They say that reporting them is a waste of time and that Google doesn't care.

Well, I found some crook with a lousy page full of ads and no content asking people to click on them. I reported him and by mistake put my email address in the report, something I usually never do.

That happened on August 31

Today I get an email saying this:

So Google does indeed take notice of these reports. The only way we can get rid of this scum that is ripping out advertisers is by reporting them, it only takes a few seconds.

 

I think you just got the email late. Its called an auto responder I got that the one time I reported right away.

 

Yeah that is an auto-responder Fryman. There are still some fraudster sites running up adsense despite them being reported 45 days back from now. I guess that G takes action once their revenue exceeds the $100 mark.

 

Probably. Google checking accounts once they pass $100 seems like a reasonable assumption. Why check beforehand? Since advertisers never see why they get a refund in clicks; there isn't a huge hurry on google's part.

 

..and then they show up here and say "I can't believe I got banned".

Of course they are checking clicks, banning people and giving "Adjustment - Click Quality" credits to Adwords publishers.

 

I have never reported an individual site. But I noticed on Ebay there was a whole bunch of people auctioning of there services to click on Google ads. I copied and pasted all the auction #'s to Google, soon after noticed that there were only maybe 1/10 of the ads like that on Ebay. So, I think they are happy to get info like that, it is just hard to ever get it completely under control.

 

Weird thing is... I got an autoresponder a few minutes after I sent this report.

And today I get this second email where they say "I have forwarded your finding..."

Sounds like a human written email to me

 

I've never put in a reply-to email address either. I dunno why (pointlessly paranoid, maybe?). next time I do it, I'll put a reply-to email too. Might be (mildly) interesting.

 

Yeah, It would be interesting to see if this email I got is actually unique or it is a usual autoresponder they send.

 

duh of course they check
nice thread...

 

Do they really credit back to the publishers? And I am seing adsense ads pointing to sites with 1 sentence text then all are ads every where. If adword allow this people to put ads for this kind of site why they will banned them later?

Don't they review site of advertiser before accepting it?

 

They do credit publishers, every month I am seeing 1 to 2% credited back.

Adsense approves you based on the first site you present to them. After approved your ads can go anywhere.

 

thats an autoresponse,

when you get a real email from the adsense, you get a persons name at the bottom of the email rather than just "the google adsense team"