hello everyone.....I quite new into all this...I wanted to know how does google record the ip addresses ....I mean does it record the ip from where we post any of our articles to our respective adsense sites...or from where we access our adsense account or is it done in some other way??
Whenever you log into your Adsense account, Google records that IP as belonging to you. If you log into your account form other locations, those, too, gets added to your list of IPs. So when you click on your own ads, they know instantly that it's you.
How would that work for us dynamic IP folks? I get a different IP almost every time I reboot this machine and the IP’s are spread out over at least 3 provinces. If someone was assigned one of my previous IP addresses and landed on one of my sites then clicked an ad could that be mistaken for click fraud?
Besides IP, they also track certain information on your machine like OS, browser, screen resolution, hardware information, etc.
I'm 99.9% sure Google uses cookies more than it does your IP (I've found Google cookies for AS, Analytics and Calendar on my machine). Cookies would solve the dynamic IP problem. If a user has cookies disabled, then IP would be the way to track them. Dynamic IPs can be "tracked" by using certain methods like traceroute, geoIP, etc. (not saying Google does it, just that there are ways, as inaccurate as they may be).
They probably use more than IP addresses as those are easily changed. They probably collect tons of information about your browser, settings (flash enabled, JavaScript enabled, screen res) etc with your IP for more conclusive tracking of who they may suspect of clicking their own ads.
they go for a hardware number called some MAC number which is stored in every cookie (hidden) and is easily tracable. More over ever motherboard has a unique one.
Don't cheat! And Don't help those who want to cheat. Click Fraud is the #1 problem with our industry. Shoemoney estimates it as high as 25% on some campaigns. Imagine if you were paying for Ads and you wanted results. But first, you had to increase your ad budget by 25% because someone is playing with cookies or IPs or something. I don't like Google's lifetime ban policy, but with threads like this one I understand why they have it.