Click Farm networks set up relatively valueless websites and then work with search engines to distribute

PPC ad listings, but obtain and send irrelevant traffic to clickable links.  Click pimping companies increase

their revenues,  advertisers get meaningless clicks and visitors browse no-content sites.

Affiliate Fraud and Competitor Fraud are still hard to spot but, astute marketers and innovative software has made both forms of online cheating easier to manage. Cheaters never lie down easy, however, and have now taken to establishing online click fraud scams defined by complex distribution networks.

Known as “click farms”, these networks have set up seemingly valid websites and then have joined with search engines to distribute pay-per-click (PPC) ad listings, as opposed to mere content vehicles. Once entrenched, click farms then employ their talents to “obtain” clicks through PPC search ads and pop-ups, sending irrelevant traffic to clickable links at low marketing costs to themselves.

Referred to as “click pimping” or PPC Arbitrage, this new type of fraud employs astute marketing and valueless domains to significantly drive up revenues; the sites in question offer visitors seeking information little or no relevant content, a plethora of PPC ads and would likely not be re-visited. Such sites are quickly weeded out by the major search engines, often not even appearing in organic indexes.

Click farm sites, then, do not even show up in any meaningful engine listings, and generate valueless clicks and little or no conversion. Yet they are increasingly prevalent on the internet, and their concept is being duplicated across many different industries doing business online. Recent research posits that click pimping may generate up to almost half of a company’s total search activity, depending on the category.
As is the case with other forms of click fraud, there are methods you can enact to identify and act against click pimping:

* Every day have your marketing people record web logs for referral sites, and identify and document who it sending traffic to your site (jot down the URL or web address). Evaluate the conversion rates from this traffic to better ascertain if the traffic is legitimate and qualified or if it is coming from a clink farm site. Request a click fraud refund from this site in question if results are found to be somewhat wanting.

* Have your marketers examine the search engine rankings of any suspected click farm sites. The engines are pretty adept at keeping these sites out of any relevant indexes or listings, so a little research should reveal any potential problems.

* Contact the search engines in question if you suspect click pimping; they will be more than willing to work with you to confirm this fraudulent activity, and then will promptly move to ensure that the site(s) in question face repercussions.