It is no secret that over the past couple years, Yahoo! has moved away from pure search traffic in their advertising network and more toward parked domains and other traffic sources. This has led to an immense increase in click fraud for their advertisers.

Till this point, Yahoo! has always honored submissions of click fraud. Advertisers routinely have a much better click fraud detection system in place than Yahoo!, and often times come up with many more clicks than their own system detects. A "good faith" credit was provided to those who sent in detailed reports of improper clicks.

It is with that which I'm shocked to see that Yahoo! has started rejecting click fraud reports. It has been two for me in the past month, as well as many more for other advertisers I am close to. Much of these clicks reside from countries outside the areas for which I'm targeting. Receiving 500 clicks from Iran in a week (when I receive only 1000 from the United States) sends up flags. Especially considering I have blocked every continent except North America. A .info domain that was registered two weeks ago was somehow able to send more traffic to me than Yahoo.com has all month.

I'm curious to know if this is a new policy in the recent wake of them turning down a generous offer from Microsoft. Shareholders are obviously going to demand a lot from them in the future and they have a history of embracing less than honorable tactics toward their advertisers (see updated TOS). It is no surprise that Yahoo! has a lot of click fraud, it is a surprise they are not honoring requests to refund it.