Surviving an AdSense Clickbombing Attack

Jan 25, 2012 by Zachary Lassiter

Click bombing a website with AdSense advertisements is now one of the new things to do when a website upsets you if your an immature brat, and the reality is there are a large number of immature brats on the Internet.  Often times web site owners are stuck in with a click bombing attack happening and are very unprepared to handle it.  In order to deal with an AdSense click bomb attack you need to first be prepared for the attack, and if you don’t prepare you are very likely to loose you AdSense account.

Google’s Stance on AdSense Click bombing

Google’s stance on AdSense click bombing is quite firm, it is the website owners responsibility to make sure it does not happen and to do whatever they can do to prevent an AdSense click bombing attack from happening.  Google has to protect is clients, the various advertisers that use the AdSense network from fraud that happens by clicking your own advertisements and other fraudulent clicks such as Click bombing.

Many website owners think they are the customers of the AdSense program.  This is wrong, and AdSense has no obligation to provide you any sort of service other than to pay you for valid clicks.  Google’s obligations are to their customers the advertisers, not to the contractors who place Advertisements on their websites.

Preparing Your Website for the Click bomb

Now many people wonder what are the first things you can do to get yourself prepared for a click bombing attack.  There are some simple things you can do to get yourself ready to survive with your AdSense account intact if you do get click bombed.

• The first thing is monitor your AdSense account for obviously fraudulent activity.  You should do this three to four times a day, don’t wait until its too late to start looking at the click activity on your AdSense account.
• The next thing you should do is make sure your website is meeting AdSense’s terms of service.  When fraudulent activity is detected AdSense does an automatic review of websites for a terms of service violation.  Make sure your privacy policy includes information about the AdSense DART cookie, that your not encouraging visitors to visit your ads and that you have not modified your AdSense code among other things.
• Use a good Statistics program that logs by IP Address.  Google Analytics is not good enough for this, and I really recommend Stat Counter Beta for this as it will log by IP Address and also integrates automatically with AdSense showing what units are clicked, when and by who.

The Click Bombing has begun

The first thing you need to do is blacklist every site from your AdSense account.  This is done in the AdSense account settings.  What you should do is create a fake site in the white list, and only that fake site.  Next review your logs and find the suspect and then report your findings to Google using their click fraud reporting form.  You should keep your websites blacklisted from your AdSense accounts for a few days until the activity stops.