Ask HN: Adsense Fake Clicks

by Ardit20 on 7/14/2009, 2:43 PM with 4 comments

For the past 4 days some persons or perhaps a bot keeps coming to my website and clicking on the ads. I went through the logs yesterday and they all seem to be different IPs from what seems legitimate businesses, yet on google analytics it shows them all under one network location.

Am I able to stop this bot or people visiting my website through blocking it somehow by using network location? If not what can I possibly do since they seem to use different IPs all the time?

  • by makecheck on 7/14/2009, 3:07 PM

    You might be able to obfuscate things a little on your end, if you can change the source code used to generate your ads.

    For example, the bot is probably searching the page for links matching specific URLs, but it might be fooled by selective use of URL encoding. Say, if you replaced the letter "o" with %6f in your ad hrefs, the links should still work, but they'd no longer match in a simple text search.

  • by ScottWhigham on 7/14/2009, 2:53 PM

    You can report the fraud but #### - Google is just not usually going to say, "You're right and we're wrong" in my experience. I've reported fraud many times and, although I can't be 100% certain due to years of advertising, but I don't recall Google ever once coming back in my favor.