Lax Adwords Admissions: Click Fraud Fuel

I examined the report of a suspicious domain that was sending a considerable amount of paid traffic to client's site. It took ten minutes to figure out that this domain was established primarily to generate revenues from Adwords and provided no value to users.

Traits:

• The domain is less than 1-month old
• The domain registration owner information is hidden
• The content on the site is copied and sometimes regurgitated from other sites
• The site has no incoming links
• The site has AdSense ads featured predominantly on the left and right sides of the pages and runs AdSense for site search
• No Alexa rank

With lax Adwords reviewing it makes it easy to see how spammy domains get into PPC content networks. This makes it easier for automated bots to have yet another site to click on with their masking technology and for hackers with access to the millions of zombie machines to hit these ads from all over the world with millions of IP addresses.