Clickbot.A eh? Google's Handwaving Exposes AdWords Structural Flaws

Have you read The Anatomy of Clickbot.A by Neil Daswani, Michael Stoppelman, and the Google Click Quality and Security Teams? (Found via Inside AdWords.) While it might be pretty interesting for a dork like myself, it makes me wonder how serious Google is about protecting the interests of its customers, AdWords advertisers. It's about Clickbot.A, a "botnet operator attempting a low-noise click fraud attack against syndicated search engines by creating doorway sites that posed as subsyndicate search engines, and by entering into referral deals." Google is trying to distance itself from the problem. Look at this graphic of the click fraud money trail from the report:



The accompanying text is quite telling:

It is important to note that in a Clickbot.A-type attack, top-tier search engines would not pay miscreants directly. Instead, they would pay syndicated search engines a share of revenue, and syndicated search engines would, in turn, pay a share of their revenue to doorway sites that posed as sub-syndicated search engines or referral accounts set up by the bot operator.

Sorry, Shuman. Google is culpable. Clean up your syndication network! Apply smart pricing to the search network. Mark as invalid clicks any that mask the referer. Fix your structural flaws. The Clickbot.A report didn't even mention whether these clicks were on the search network or the content network. That's important information that was left out. Move AdSense for Domains traffic off of both the search network and content network and build a new domain network. These options no longer suffice:



Perhaps Google is afraid to show the world the crazy aunt in the basement spinning straw into gold? BTW, that "crazy aunt" quote cracks me up. But, distribution fraud is no laughing matter. Nor is the AdWords expanded matching flaw. These types of problems are more of a day-to-day concern for PPC advertisers than a botnet that's "attempting a low-noise click fraud attack." No, the handwaving doesn't ease any click fraud concerns. Instead, it exposes other AdWords structural flaws.

Apogee Tags (made w/ TagBuildr): clickfraud, click bot, distribution fraud, clickbot.a, botnet, botnets, google adwords, ppc advertising, search engine marketing, neil daswani, michael stoppelman