Click Fraud and Spam

Click fraud, the practice of clicking an ad hundreds or thousands of times to artificially increase the conversion rate, affects all advertisers and could, several experts say, become Google's Achilles' heel. Besides unscrupulous competitors, dissatisfied customers may use bogus clicks in an attempt to exact revenge, or site owners might generate fake clicks to boost their income from AdSense or a similar program that pays the owners every time an Internet surfer clicks ads displayed on the site.

According to companies specializing in auditing traffic quality, fake clicks cost Internet advertisers hundreds of millions of dollars and amount to about 15 percent of total clicks (advertisers surveyed by Outsell estimate that 14.6 ...

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