Yahoo Pay Per Click Settlement Details Goes Out To Advertisers

This morning, many Yahoo advertisers received an email from Rust Consulting letting them know, they are included in a legal settlement over Yahoo search ads. The settlement web site, which is at inreyahoosettlement.com explains that the "lawsuit alleges that customers contracted for targeted ad placements through two products, “Sponsored Search” and “Content Match” (and predecessor products provided by Overture Services, Inc. and GoTo.com, Inc.) and that Yahoo! breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (bulk r [...]

Filed in: Legal: Clickfraud, Yahoo: Legal, Yahoo: Search Ads


Click Fraud Rise Or Fall? Click Fraud 22.9% Or 12.7%

Today, I received two click fraud reports from two different companies. The first was from Anchor Intelligence and the second was from Click Forensics. Anchor Intelligence reported a click fraud rate of 22.9% for the second quarter of 2009, up from 21.7% in the first quarter. While Click Forensics reports a click fraud rate of 12.7% in the second quarter of 2009, down from 13.8% in the first quarter. That is a 10 plus point difference in the click fraud rate, reported by these two agencies. Who should you believe? Click Fraud can be measured on many different levels. Anchor broke out [...]

Filed in: Legal: Clickfraud


Microsoft Taking Click Fraud Battle To Court

The New York Times reports that Microsoft is taking the click fraud battle to court. "Microsoft filed the civil complaint on Monday in United States District Court in Seattle against Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen, of Vancouver, British Columbia, along with several corporation names they were believed to have used, and several unnamed parties." The Times quotes Tim Cranton, a Microsoft attorney, who says they've decided to get more active in fighting fraudulent clicks on web ads. "The theory is you can change the economics around crime or fraud by making it more expensive." The [...]

Filed in: Legal: Clickfraud, Microsoft: Business Issues


Does Including A Physical Address On Your Website Help Rankings?

As businesses become more virtual in organization and structure, and more workers become digital nomads, the question of  whether having a physical, real-world address on your website will have any effect on your rankings becomes more important. In this article I'll take a look how a real world address can have some impact on your sites organic listings. Let's look at the auto repair sector. We'll be looking at national chain/franchises, whether they have a corporate address in the footer or on the site, public or private whois data, does the whois data match and do they have a crawlable/i [...]

Filed in: 100% Organic, How To: SEO, Legal: Clickfraud, SEO: Local


Click Fraud Rate Hits Highest Level Yet

Click fraud is worse today than ever according to an announcement from tracking company Click Forensics. Click Forensics estimates the overall average click fraud rate for Q4 2008 at 17.1%, the highest level since they began tracking it in 2006. That rate is up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported in Q4 2007. Click fraud estimates on the search engine content networks are said to be at 28.2%, up from 27.1% in Q3. They also estimate that botnets were responsible for 31.4% of click fraud in the last quarter of 2008, up from 27.6% in Q3, and also the highest level yet. [...]

Filed in: Legal: Clickfraud


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