The explosion in Search Engine Marketing opportunities and increasing expenditure has started to make some Keywords very competitive, this has lead to new online crime Click Fraud.

Click Fraud can be divided into two main categories 1. Cost Per Click Content Fraud and 2. Click Fraud for SEM manipulation

CPC Content Fraud is where site owners click on the advertisers on their own site to gain the click fee, these are often pick up by the Search Engines and can also be stopped by IP and Site Exclusion through your SEM control panels in AdWords & Yahoo etc.

But the second and more difficult to stop, Click Fraud for SEM manipulation, this is where your competitor clicks on your ads to use up your daily budget so when your ad disappears theirs is promoted up, this practise is nothing short of stealing and robs legitimate advertisers of millions of dollars in transactions each year, when we discussed this with Google & Yahoo in Australia, Google said that if an advertiser was proven to be involved in such activity they would be banned from the Adwords program, Yahoo were a little less forthcoming saying that if we were to provide proof it wouldn't necessarily act on it as this may be a breach of privacy?

Over the next few weeks we will look at ways to prevent Click Fraud for SEM manipulation