Click Fraud Lawsuit
by Sapphire (April 6, 2005)
An e-commerce site has filed a lawsuit against several search engines including Google and Yahoo, alleging that they knowingly overcharged for pay-per-click online advertising… Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles…claims that search engines colluded to overcharge advertisers, according to the Associated Press.
We don’t know exactly what type of fraudulent click they’re claiming happened. The usual one is the very quick one-page hit that spends some of your PPC budget and gives you no ROI. As gchaney says at SEOChat:
It’s easy to whine and say.. “Oh, see the visitors came from this domain and they never did nothing but come to the landing page, I must be getting gamed”. People bitch about getting cleaned. Yeah, fraud happens. However, most times a page does not convert is advertisers themselves and how they market (improper title and chit descriptions) and where they send these potential clients.
I suspect this is true in most cases. But take a look at the site in question. It’s a typical net retailer - not a spammy AdSense page. My browser’s speed detector claims it takes 106 seconds to load at 14.4 kbps, which is a typical report for this type of site (it loads very fast on my T1). It doesn’t strike me as a site I would check out if I was searching for what it sells. I also took a look at the competition at Google under “dolls and collectibles”, and a lot of the top sites don’t seem any better.
Posted in SEO
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