Click Fraud and Search Engine MarketingPublished by PPC-List.comWhether it be an overanxious affiliate of a pay per click search engine, or the search engine itself, if you have participated in search engine marketing you have most likely found yourself to be the victim of click fraud, whether you know it or not. Click fraud is tainting the image of many pay per click search engines and costing advertisers far too much money. Although the negative effects of click fraud are obvious to both advertisers and pay per click search engines, many engines do not take the necessary steps to curb click fraud. The result is that you are losing moneyTypes of Click FraudForced Traffic and Robot TrafficThe most egregious form of click fraud comes from forced traffic. Utilizing pop-ups, start page exchanges, and other mass traffic generation tools, the person committing the fraud forces traffic through paid listings. For example, if the person committing click fraud were to use pop-ups, rather than have a pop-up display the content of an ad, the pop-up is used deliver a visitor to the click URL that the engine uses to track traffic. The search engine does not know that the click was not user generated, but rather generated by a pop-up. As a result the search engine deducts money from the advertiser’s account and considers the pop-up to actually be a click. The affiliate then gets paid for delivering nothing more than a pop-up. Many PPC’s have attempted to reduce the ability of affiliates to force traffic to their listings. Using unique session logging and requiring a valid HTTP referrer are a couple of ways click fraud is being reduced by some pay per click search engines. Even with these methods in place, some people have still discovered ways to force traffic to paid listings. The best defense a PPC has against forced traffic is to perform routine audits on their network and their affiliates.Robot traffic is a form of forced traffic, however, instead of having the click URL load fully in a user’s browser the click URL is merely called by an automated program. Search engines that do not guard against this type of traffic will once again consider this to be a legitimate click. The danger with robot traffic is that it can be generated innocently by search engines crawling the web. Fortunately most search engines distinguish between spidered traffic and real traffic.Excessive International TrafficAlthough the Internet transcends most international borders, excessive traffic from Asia often signal generally poor quality traffic from your search engine. This traffic is particularly dangerous to your advertising campaigns as most advertisers do not know how to distinguish traffic origins by country. More dangerous yet is the fact that many search engines do nothing to filter out excessive international traffic. International traffic is considered valid traffic by these engines as it is user originated traffic.International traffic is not what most advertisers are hoping to spend their money on when starting a pay per click search engine campaign. The target market of most advertisers includes the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, other European countries, and possibly Australia. In addition to the traffic not being truly focused, this excessive international traffic also has a greater chance of being generated through incentivized or fraudulent means. Sport and Competitor ClickingIn highly competitive pay per click scenarios advertisers may turn to dishonest means to hurt their competition. Such is the case with competitor clicking. Competitor clicking is the act of clicking on listings for the sake of costing another advertiser money. In an extreme case of competitor clicking, one company may click a listing several times in a row with the hope of depleting their competition’s funds.Sport clicking works in a similar fashion, however, instead of a competitor clicking on a listing a non-interested party clicks on expensive keywords. When a person comes across an expensive pay per click listing, many times they become interested in who would pay for such a listing. Other people just simply click on listings because they know it costs the advertiser money. property transactions management