Websites offer a payment plan for the number of visitors that come to a website. Those websites usually contain ads, which when clicked generate revenue. If you are paid by that website, and click on those ads, it is called click fraud, because you are increasing the number of clicks on that ad, and increasing the revenue of the website. The website is in turn paying you, and you are getting monies illegally if you are clicking on those ads, or are asking someone else to click on the ads for you. Clicking on ads, enticing someone else to click on ads, is click fraud and is cause enough for you to loose your website account, and also to loose any money that might be currently owed to you.

The same holds true for Adsense which uses a payment mechanism that awards a certain amount of money to a publisher (someone who holds an Adsense banner on their page) every time a person clicks on the said banner. So click fraud is the attempt to have people clicking the ads just so that they can earn a greater income.

There are people setting up sites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating revenue through Google's Adsense program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through many methods, some complex and sophisticated and some rudimentary and simple. One of the most complex is through the use of so called "hitbots" (which are now banned by most sites). These are automated programs who emulate clicking the links in Adsense banners (there are some that actually click the banners as well).

Another, more rudimentary method is to hire a lot of people in a poor country to click the links on your site. This means these people will actually sit all-day and just click links so you can earn a fortune. Of course, there's a problem with this. Once Google receives a large number of clicks from a single address, the address and the site that had the Adsense banner will be banned, and the illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued. In general terms, will your account be closed, you will also loose any money owed to you, and you may be sued on top of that. To prevent this from happening, many people use a large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. There is a great deal of illegal activity in this area, but web masters and others are finding new ways to combat illegal clicking.

Google has a very strict policy regarding click fraud, and it has sued those employing such techniques in the past. But while the search engine giant tries its best to minimize the risk of click fraud there's certainly room for a lot of improvement.

It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an Adsense link are just done in order to get money from the person paying for the ad. Some people believe the number of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large. There are a great deal more schemes involving click fraud, such as groups of Adsense publishers clicking each other's links (which is referred to as "clicking rings", or spamming people so that they click such links.

There is protection against such schemes and all advertisers should be aware enough to employ them. Many advertisers choose to avoid the content network all together for fear of click fraud.

Tags & Keywords : click, click fraud, practice, computing, underworld