Definition of clickbot

What is a clickbot? clickbot is a specialized bot made to simulate clicking. Initially popular for gaming cheat, now clickbot has taken the highlight in pay-per-click advertisement business. In 2004, a California man created a clickbot that he claimed cannot be detected by Google. Failed to make good money selling the program, he tried to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program. He was arrested, nonetheless.

For computer savvy users, creating a clickbot is very simple and straight forward. You just need a macro to record your activities. While the macro is recoding, you visit your own site and click on the ads. Save the macro, and then let it run. Of course, you will also need a list of proxies to cover your track.

Source: http://www.tentacool.net/blog/?p=682

Introducing interest-based advertising

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast"). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

For more information about interest-based advertising, visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

How Google Detects AdSense Invalid Clicks

Still thinking to cheat AdSense? Stop that. It will never bring you anywhere. You might pull it off with smaller ads network, but definitely not with Google. Here are some detection methods they might use. At the very least, they have the resources to do so.

IP Address
If the AdSense click is originated from the same IP Address as the one used for accessing your AdSense account, your account is flagged.

Cookies
Most home users do not use static IP Address for Internet connection. In most cases just disconnect and reconnect will give you a new IP Address. But don’t forget, Google has set cookies on your computer.

To read more, go to: http://www.tentacool.net/blog/?p=314

Closing of AdSense Referrals

AdSense Referrals program will be retiring with effect 31 August.

Here are some alternative options to consider:

* Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will nowoperate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSenseReferrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based onadvertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions.For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.

* AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units. If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:

* Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.

* Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on yourdesktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign informationWhy is this happening?We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program.

If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center: http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882

Source: http://www.google.com/adsense/