Just seen iro 200 clicks hitting one of my sites with an increase of only 500 page views. OK, normally over a full day this wouldn't raise too many alarm bells for me. The site normally has iro 3000 page views and between 100->200 clicks per day. But since the site got hammered in this update I've only been seeing about 1300 daily page views and dumped to 25 (or so) clicks. I don't have click tracking scripts installed on this site, so I don't know if these clicks were accumulated over the day so far - or whether they really did happen within the 2 hour window my reporting scripts are showing. Even over the full day it would arrouse my suspicions with the SERPs as they currently are. Looks like I'm going to find out how fair Google are when it comes to suspicious clicks. I'm convinced that bringing it to Google's attention quickly will be of help to me. So for those of you who think I go over the top to ensure that adsense anomalies are brought to my attention would you rather pick up this type of activity when it happens or at the end of the month when you get an email from Google ? Fingers crossed that Google are fair when suspicious things happen on an account and that they'll tell me what IP address made the clicks.
Could it be that you have perhaps gained serps you didn't have before during the update? In any case, fingers crossed for you.
It's possible, but if it has happened then I'm not seeing it in my trackers. But then I've never yet managed to work out what all the keywords were that this site ranked for so anything is possible - I'm tracking about 200 and only seeing minor movements. I've recently (yesterday) started investigating better stats packages, so I've put the stats through them and I'm not seeing any massive jump in referrals. SE referals are up slightly on yesterday, but no where near previous levels yet. Also, I'm showing one IP address as pulling >1000 page views in 2 hours and it doesn't appear to be a bot. It's fetched numerous pages between 20 and 40 times each. And for anyone interested it's not in Asia but the US
I sent an email to G within about 30 minutes of noticing it. I will post what I can about there reply whe I get one. Hopefully this will help lay to rest the idea that it is easy for someone else to cripple your adsense account.
They won't give you the IP addresses! They just thank you for leting them know! I once had a 500% increase in clicks, which didn't generate extra income. So the system knew they were fraud clicks.
Yeah this is pretty much SOP for them in this situations. I always drop them a note when I notice something extremely out of line, but they already know about it... so not sure how effective it is. But I like having a record of such occurences at least for my own information.
The clicks (or at least some of them) did register income all be it not a lot. $4 for that many clicks certainly isn't much I've had clicks in the past which never seemed to generate income, those clicks also disappeared from the stats after a while. These clicks are still on the stats though as is the small income that came in through them. I'm confident they wouldn't drop the account for something like this but you never know. I'll certainly feel much happier when they respond - which is likely to be Monday I'd guess. I'd be happy if they even hint that the IP address I passed to them was correct.
If you get the termination notice a few days after E-Mailing them about the fraud clicks, it'll help BIG time!! Hince it's a very good idea to contact them and save your E-mail and there reply!!!! Atleast one user did get the termination notice after reporting it and used the E-Mails to get back in the program!!!!
200 clicks on 500 impressions? That's a 40% CTR, seems really high to me. If you want, install www.asrep.com and take a look at the reports before deciding if you want to contact Google or not. The script updates in real time, so after an hour, you should have some idea of what's going on.
For large sites, I suggest setting up asrep on its own dedicated server or it'll completely bring your sites down!
What do you class as a large site ? 1000, 10,000 or 1,000,000 uniques per day. Bryan, as I said I have no tracking scripts in place on that site. How would asrep actually help with something that has alread happened, it can show me what happens in the future but not the past. I sure a heck ain't openning adsense back up on this site just to see if it happens again - not until I get a reply from G.
Each person defines a large site differently. You could handle a lot more visitors if your site is static, but if it is dynamic, don't expect to run asrep on the same server. Unless of course you like to keep rebooting your server. Asrep doesn't really help, but if you had it installed earlier, it could track which IP did the clicking.
Sounds like you have some experience of this. at what point did you find that asrep was overloading things ?
I've had +40000 page impressions tracked via. asrep without crashes, granted reports got a little slow, but no reboots.
It depends on your server specs also. My site is dynamic so I can't afford to share those resources with asrep. The flush to DB takes 5-10 minutes also, and more than likely times out, even running a cron doesn't help. What are your server specs?
I have multiple servers ranging from dual xeon's with 4GB ram down to Celerons with 256MB. Has anyone done a study of what the resource requirements of asrep actually are ? Other than the reporting side of things, I'd assume it's only another write to the database for each click ? I'll have to look at the code to see what it actually does, but I fail to see how it can put that much of an extra load on a server
I stopped using it a while ago so I am not sure if I remember. They recommend large sites to buffer it and dump the data via a cron job, the dumping part killed my server, but it should be fine on your dual xeon.