Yahoo on click fraud

Click fraud is one of the biggest challenges faced by paid search networks such as Yahoo and Google. It is well known that many of the “get rich through web” schemes are nothing but networks of click fraud groups.

Last month Jeffrey K. Rohrs wrote a blog post titled “The Sausage Manifesto – An open letter” directed at the pay per click advertisers,

Indeed, today’s PPC traffic is very much like sausage-a tasty mystery meat comprised of a variety of high quality ingredients as well as some bits and pieces that the engines would frankly prefer you don’t ask much about. Those bits – invalid clicks, fraudulent clicks, and clicks from search garbatrage are increasingly hitting the radar of advertisers and, quite rightly, they are beginning to ask some pretty meaty questions of Google, Yahoo, and others such as:

* How do you define an invalid (i.e., non-billable) click?
* What is the true size of the click fraud problem?
* ……..

Here is the response of John Slade (Yahoo! Search Marketings Senior Director of Product Management),

With that belief in mind, Yahoo! is working hard to put our money where our mouth is. We proactively identify suspicious clicks and remove them from our billing system 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – as a result, we’ve given away billions of clicks for free. We’ve invested significant technological, financial and human resources in clickthrough protection since we started this industry in 1998 and are redoubling our efforts by dedicating even more resources to this issue. You’ll be hearing more specifics from us soon, but I can tell you that we have in fact committed to building a Traffic Quality Resource Center, are continually expanding our clickthrough protection team and will be announcing new leaders within our organization who will focus entirely on enhancing and overseeing our traffic quality initiatives.

So I think, search engines will be substantially increasing the size of their click fraud protection teams. A combination of human and automatic checking can only be effective in tackling this problem.