Google has added a feature to allow anyone to report publisher enganging in Google AdSense click fraud.

Simply clicking the Ads by Google or Ads by Goooooogle links you see shown as part of ads. It will pops open a new window. Include the phrase invalid clicks in the comment fields to report click fraud.

So what exactly is an invalid clicks according to Google?

Invalid clicks are clicks generated through prohibited methods. These prohibited methods include but are not limited to: repeated manual clicks, or the use of robots, automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software.

Read complete post at JenSense: Reporting publisher click fraud to Google just got easier.

VBWebmaster forum has been a target for malicous Google AdSense click fraud recently. Noticing invalid clicks generated on the ads, Google disabled their AdSense account.

Practices such as clicks generated by a published on his/her own web pages, clicks generated through the use of robots and automated clicking tools, or any deceptive software are frowned and in violation of Google Adsene Terms and Conditions and program policies.

In situation where the incident is out of control of the publisher such as this case, publishers can get their account disabled or even banned. Fortunately after sending an explanation email to Google, they get their account reinstated.

It’s good to see that Google AdSense Support Team listens and responds to publisher’s concern such as this one, especially considering the amount of publishers they have to support. But then I noticed a few things the webmaster did, what I assume actions that help him get their account restored:

1. He noticed sudden increase in clicks more than a week ago and reported that to AdSense support team twice
2. He sent an email explaning the whole thing in a professional way

Any publisher can be a victim of such click fraud, and this incident serves as a good example of how we should respond to it. A closer look at the click trends and other sudden changes helps a publisher spot problems.

Another strange thing to mention is Google has not adjusted the account’s earnings. Read the whole discussion here.

Google AdSense AdLinks has a set of new horizontal ad formats, with the size of 468×15 (banner) and 728×15 (leaderboard), both displaying up to 4 and 5 links.

With this new ad formats, publishers has more option to display AdLinks on horizontal space in additional to the current square format mostly placed on sidebar.

As usual some people see decreasing results when testing this out, while other get pretty exciting and increasing click-through rate. No hard number yet, but you can monitor the forum for the discussion.

Webmaster World forum thread: New Ad Link Formats, New horizontal adlinks = drop in epc?

Tribune Co.’s Newsday has dropped Google AdSense in favor of their own in-house contextual advertising. The Newsday program, called Pay-Per-Click, allows advertisers to place ads on the Newsday web site associated with specific sections, subject matters or geographical areas.

When advertisers want to place an ad on a specific Web site that uses Google AdSense, the best they can do is to specify a geographic area, Wills said. In addition, sites that use Google for advertising don’t develop relationships with advertisers. While this may reduce the staffing load on small operations, a newspaper that already has an ad-sales staff loses the opportunity to build contacts.

“To me that gives the relationship and the power of the advertiser to Google and not to us,” Wills told E&P Monday morning.

Currently they are offering every business who signs up $50 worth of free clicks. The price of a click is based on automatic auctioning. Advertiser sets the largest bid for display on a certain topic or area, and set daily expenditures.

By managing their own in house program, they can build relationship with advertisers, have better control of the ads behavior and layout.

Via EditorAndPublisher.

GoogleGuy, a Google staff that contributes to a number of search related forums currently replied to a request at Webmaster Forum to tighten up quality control standards on the type of website they accept and keep in the program. The original poster’s main concern is the mass appearance of junk sites and scrapers for Google AdSense.

Freedom, fair points — I hate spam pages that use AdSense. I’m talking to some people on that side of the company about how to get spam out of AdSense. It may be that we can designate a keyword to use (like “spamreport”) in the “Ads by Goooogle” feedback link. A few weeks ago, that form didn’t send back the publisher id as well, or at least not in the database that I saw. I think that they were going to add that though. Once that’s working, it would provide a simple way to report a spam page with AdSense right from that page.

Ask folks about this more in New Orleans too, but I’m working on it. In the meantime, use the Campaign Negative Sites feature of AdWords to specify any sites that you don’t want your ads to show on. That’s an indirect signal of feedback as well.

I guess this means that Google is working behind the scene for some time to do something about these types of sites.

Link to GoogleGuy’s answer.