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Abusive ad clicks

Why surge of clicks from Italy?

puente

2:51 pm on Jun 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

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3-4 years ago i noticed a sudden surge in adsense earnings. was elated at first but then got skeptical. i checked earnings by country and italy was at the top by far, when it was insignificant before.

panicked i shut off adsense, dug into logs, identified the abusive ip segments, indeed from italy, blocked them and got back in business. google clawed back those earnings at the end of the month and then all was stable.

recently i fronted the site with cloudflare and in a matter of days, the adsense surge was back. checked by country and yes, italy had returned. i'm stunned. could it be that all these years the abusive italian ip's have been hitting the site in vain and now they had a way in?

so had to block italy from cloudflare. i suppose can now try captcha or js challenge as a less militant approach.

questions:

- are these bots or people, direct abusers or for hire a la fiverr? reckon google has decent defense against bots.

- what's in it for them to run this abuse? just to try a get a random small site in trouble with google? drain a competitor's advertising budget? test abuse methods on a sample site before implementing on own sites? by now they must realize google will claw back the earnings.

- have others here experienced similar abuse? what did you do?

not2easy

4:40 pm on Jun 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator

10+ Year Member

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Many webmasters have had similar problems and it goes back to the early days of advertising online. There are a variety of bots and reasons. You can use the search form on our top menu bar to do a site search for something like "click bots" using your favorite bot and find discussions from this month or from 2001 - there are a lot, like a library of information.

Since you're using Cloudflare you can use some of their tools, it helps to know how and why you are blocking traffic. Many of the discussions are in the AdSense forums, but those are mostly personal complaints without specifics. The informative and how-to discussions are in our Search Engine Spider and User Agent Identification forum: [webmasterworld.com...]

This month's list is here: [webmasterworld.com...]

JorgeV

5:22 pm on Jun 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Hello,

Check to which kind of range, this IP belongs to. Is it an IP from a data center for example?

puente

8:00 pm on Jun 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

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here's an example,185.22.nn.nnn resolves to fastwebnet.it apparently some sort of isp.

a crap ton of traffic coming from it and now blocked at cloudflare. maybe this particular one is a clicker bot or a scraper one. either way it's abusive.

unfortunately hard to tell what kind of bot it is as adsense doesn't provide ip data. but blocking italy, has stopped the click surge.

thanks not2easy for the server farm link. this was bad enough to begin with and ipv6 has added quite a bit more to the aggravation.

thankful for services like cloudflare at least. i couldn't deal with the grind anymore. felt like sinking in quicksand.

[edited by: puente at 8:13 pm (utc) on Jun 15, 2020]

[edited by: not2easy at 10:13 pm (utc) on Jun 15, 2020]
[edit reason] anonymized specific IP [/edit]

freitasm

8:07 pm on Jun 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

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Before blocking the whole country (or ASN) using the Cloudflare Firewall Rules, make sure your webserver only accepts incoming requests from Cloudflare IP addresses here [cloudflare.com...] - otherwise bots can still reach your server directly via its IP address.

Once this is done, you can use Scrape Shield (if you can edit your site's templates) and enable Server Side Excludes by adding the tags around the adsense code: [support.cloudflare.com...]

Next, in Firewall | Settings change the Security Level to something like Medium if not done yet - check the help link under the setting for more information.

Also in Firewall | Settings turn on the Bot Fighting Mode option.

Once this is done check to see if things calm down.

puente

8:23 pm on Jun 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

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had never even noticed the settings link in cloudflare fw. it's off to the right by its lonesome and easy to miss i guess.

also missed scrape shield. it's all the way at the end and partially masked. prob reckoned it was some paid feature.

this is good stuff. think i need to click everything now and see what other nice cf features i've missed.

thanks mate