Beware Online Business Owners – Click Fraud Alert

So you finally moved your business online. Now what? You must help your customers find your newly created area in cyberspace. Years ago, you would just list your website with a dozen search engines, and then call it a day. But with over 8 trillion web pages indexed today on major search engines, most companies are finding out that their old techniques are nearly useless.
Here comes google’s “Adwords’ program to the rescue! Basically Google’s Adwords program allows companies as well as personal projects to have advertisements not only on google, but also other participating websites. This program helps create revenue 3 ways:

1. Companies looking to get their products sold, pay google to put out their advertisements via Adwords. The hope to sell more products because more people know about their products because they saw the ad box.
   
2. Webmasters can host relevant advertising via Adwords on their own sites. Google will pay these webmasters every time an ad is clicked on their site.
   
3. Google collects a small amount every time an ad is clicked, no matter if the ad was on google.com or on another website. The webmaster collects more.
   This looks like a win, win for everyone, right? The companies get to connect with their customers, and the web site owner’s advertiser locations get paid when they connect a potential customer to a company.
   

After I completed my Google Spam Sites article, it finally hit me! These webmasters that are using “scraping” techniques to create websites all had Adword ads on their website… But why do I think this is subspecies and a topic for Captain America and Google Fraud Alert you might ask? The answer, I believe, relates why these webmasters created the website in the first place… Evidence indicates the sole purpose is to falsely create revenue by using Adword ads.

If these websites are using illegal techniques to get content, why shouldn’t we think they are using other illegal techniques such as “Click Fraud”? Click Fraud is when webmasters click on Adword advertisements on their own websites, or get other people to do this for them, so they get money from google. The person paying the bill is the unsuspecting company who has a Google adwords box. In my honest opinion, this is even worse than scraping, because now we are talking about actual money STOLEN!

Here are a couple links of webmasters that are using scraping techniques just to fill up space so they can have another page of google’s adwords.

1. GOOGLE ALERT WEBRAW (aka QUIXTAR BLOG) Adwords
   http://www.webraw.com/quixtar/
   
   
   ALERT WEBRAW( aka QUIXTAR BLOG) LINKING MEMBER HUGO – More Adwords
   
2. http://log.hugoschotman.com/hugo/
   

If you look closely, the above links seem to fall inside the same “ring” of websites. Is it possible that some group of webmasters is part of a slimy attempt to operate a google fraud ring?

If the name of this linking hub (link farm) site is webraw.com - as his valid domain indicates- is this person attempting a masquerade? Is he guilty of something other than lack of imagination in domain naming? Is he hiding his webraw identity? I say, "Be proud of your fishy heritage."
Why is he directing his sycophants to call links to his http://www.webraw.com/ site Quixtar Blog? And why is he soliciting donations from an unsuspecting public while participating in what might be seen as questionable business practices? I do see a minor disclaimer. More questionable behavior.

Do we also see an attempted high jacking or cyber squatting on the term Quixtar? Could be. Wonder what ransom amount a ring would have in mind to return a name to its legal owners? I observe. You decide.
Unfortunately this behavior isn’t unique to these two.

Tell us what you think!