Clicking on ads on Google Cache pages?

[alien51]

I have a Chinese psycho who came to one of my websites and started terrorizing my adsense. The first few clicks i was able to ban his IP address from htaccess.

But checking on my Statcounter, the psycho came back after like 4-6 hours and was able to click on 8 more adsense links (exit links). Same IP.

Looks like he got a 403, then went to the google cache to wreak more havoc? Is that possible?

I got ticked, i banned his entire IP block.

 

[allan3139]

No, they can't view your website from google cache in China, google cache was Blocked in China years ago,

 

[alien51]

So does that mean he was clicking the Back button each time and kept the browser on my webpage for 6 hours? So the cache page was from his own machine. Because i already blocked the IP and he was still doing it 6 hours later from the same IP.

 

[allan3139]

yes, he also could be used by some tools.

 

[enlytend]

google cache was Blocked in China years ago,

It was, but is it 100% foolproof? Aren't there some ways to get around it?

IF the problem is from google's (or any other) cache, you can go into your Adsense setup and authorize only your sites themselves to show ads - ads would be disabled on cached pages. It's under "account settings -> Access and Authorization".

Also, you might want to add a "noarchive" tag, which tells Google/Bing not to store a cached copy of your page. This also cuts down on content scraping.

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, noarchive">​

If you haven't already, contact Google and tell them someone (give them the IP and any info you have) was clicking your ads maliciously. Better to be proactive, before they ban YOU for invalid clicks!

 

[alien51]

Ok, thanks. Adding URLs on the access/autho has been in my to-do checklist for the longest time, never bothered to do it all along.

I don't know why Google has to ban an account just to band-aid fix a site with invalid clicks. What if your site has a huge legit traffic and many valid clicks. Hunting invalid clicks is like looking for a needle in the haystack. Do they expect us to babysit our cpanel and stat logs all day and do nothing else with our lives?

They could have simply switched-off the revenue counter then send you an email notice.

Their Adsense Panel doesn't even tell a publisher about detected invalid clicks (or am i missing it?). I'm not sure why they don't just display a huge alert banner in red fonts on your Adsense Panel saying "Invalid Clicks Detected", so you could have fixed the issue right away.

 

[enlytend]

They could have simply switched-off the revenue counter then send you an email notice.

Their Adsense Panel doesn't even tell a publisher about detected invalid clicks (or am i missing it?). I'm not sure why they don't just display a huge alert banner in red fonts on your Adsense Panel saying "Invalid Clicks Detected", so you could have fixed the issue right away.

It would be nice of them .. of course if someone was deliberately generating invalid clicks themselves, then they'd know that Google was wise to them ...

They do detect them a lot of the time(and remove any revenue they generated) - problem is that they can't know for sure why it happened. How do they know you didn't pay someone to pad yur earnings a little?

It's a good idea to stay on top of your logs and stats for everything - doesn't take all day, just checking everything once a day will catch a lot of things. You can also set up cron scripts to alert you, if you're ambitious.

If I see anything out of the ordinary in traffic, earnings or clicks anywhere (not just Adsense-related) I look into it. I had a good scare last year when one of my pages on a "dormant" site all of a sudden started getting a lot of traffic and racking up clicks - turned out there was a new and aggressive marketing campaign for a small product I'd written up a couple years ago! That was a nice surprise, other times I've had to ban IP's. (Most of my pages are "noarchive" so caching isn't an issue.)

BTW, the "report invalid clicks" form is somewhere in Adsense help.

PITA, but that's life - good luck!

 

[Toni]

BTW, the "report invalid clicks" form is somewhere in Adsense help.

It's here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=invalid_clicks_contact

 

[bluearrow]

Just report AdSense those as invalid clicks. Idiots are everywhere IP banning won't stop them. Google do a pretty good job about this these days so will just remove those invalid click even if you don't report. But it's better report just to be on safe side.