fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

Recent hair-raising findings indicating that click fraud rates are steeply on the uprise, with Yahoo! at least acknowledging the problem and Google shifting into customary turbo denial mode call for a solid, hardnosed reviewal of ROI projections in this market space.

Lost Clicks offers help for people who want to join in a class action against click fraud, suing the search engines for collecting fees for PPC advertising they’re not actually providing.

Tim Yang reports on his recent e-mail exchange with a representative of an Indian ad clicking syndicate. While his contact proved fairly clueless, it does constitute a clear indication that the concept is trickling down into mainstream petty crime.

Maybe some of the posters on this thread are right in that it’s time to stand up against Google’s less than favorable terms touching upon their AdSense program.

One would have thought that a company of Google’s resources and technical savvy would be able to prevent further downloads of their established spy- and malware. The more so as this specific download link is still being propagated across a multitude of blogs and fora. After all, they’ve had three full days to do it. But that’s precisely what’s not happening.

Here’s a page you can display to people who you are restricting from accessing your site because they’re using Google’s nefarious spyware. Plus some graphics we’re donating to the public domain: spread the message!

A search engine marketing panel featuring Mike Grehan, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Andy Beal and Ben Wills must be, if nothing else, entertaining and educative. Which it is.

Another fat nail in the PPC industry’s coffin? If four out of five Web users refuse to click on online ads, finding them intrusive and irrelevant, what does that tell us about the efficacy of PPC advertising?

PPC engine Blowsearch enthusiastically announces a product for click fraud detection, to be launched soon. We’re not holding our breath …

This blog is focused on aggregating media coverage of the all-pervasive PPC fraud problem.

While this patent, if granted, may indeed reduce click fraud to some extent, chances are it will also kill PPC business effectively in the process. Arguably a cure worse than the disease it tries to tackle.

New web analytics and click fraud tracking tool (beta) launched by WebSourced.

All’s not well at all in the search marketing industry. This piece takes a cold, hard look at the state of the SEO nation, and it’s not a pretty sight.

Fraudulent clicks, adjacking, Black Hat PPC tactics - with an estimated 30% of PPC dollars falling victim to fraud, is the Golden Era of IP delivery (cloaking) finally dawning?

The magnitude of click fraud - and what to do about it