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Until recently I was almost convinced the AdSense Click Bombing was a thing of the past, but earlier today I happened to be its victim, and I merely lost my AdSense account. Fortunately, I was able to react quickly and my account was restored, but still I lost more than 24 hours of AdSense income while my account was locked.

First lets explain what AdSense Click Bombing is. Click Bombing is exactly what it sounds like. A malicious user (most probably a webmaster who is really pissed at you for some reason) clicks hundreds of times on your AdSense Advertisements in order to produce large number fraudulent clicks. In almost all cases this large number of clicks by a single user (ip) rise flag for Click Spam in the AdSense System and they automatically LOCK your account. If somehow it is determined that this user had access to your AdSense account aka knows the password and has logged in your account from the same computer, it is assumed that this might be you or a person that is related to you and your accounts get BANNED. Also in most cases when this attack occurs and you are not aware and you don’t react properly, your account also can get banned and you won’t even know what struck you.

My recent survey showed that a large number of AdSense experienced the effect of AdSense Click Bombing on their websites. The people that was able to react to that and quickly file report with AdSense that they found suspicious behavior on their ads (which is really easy to see when you get the channel with 200%-300% CRT and a massive amount of clicks) you can save your account from being banned and was restored within few hours or so after the attack stopped, but others who did not monitor their AdSense account activity close enough got their accounts banned for life. Some of the people that got their accounts banned also informed me that they were able to restore their accounts later on by providing a lot of information to the AdSense team showing access logs and etc which showed that they are not guilty.

In any case reporting to the AdSense Team is the first and most important thing that you can do when you see that somebody is trying to Click Bomb you AdSense ads. In such moments you should file up a report on the HELP section of your AdSense account and highlight the fact that somebody is Click Bombing you and you have nothing to do with this and therefore as a honest AdSense publisher you’re reporting it. When you do that, the second thing you should do is to temporarily remove the ads from the attacked website and therefore prevent any further click bombing. Note that AdSense will not unlock your account until the attack stops so its better to remove the ads from the attacked website and keep them on other websites that are not being offended (at least minimize your loses for the day).

If you react quickly the chances that you won’t get banned and your account will be restored to full functionality is extremely high and therefore it’s advisable to be done as quickly as possible.

I asked few experienced AdSense publishers for advices on how to protect myself from AdSense Click Bombing and they all said that if you were or are a victim of Click Bombing then its strongly advisable that one should use Click Fraud Prevention Software. Fortunately for us, there is this AdLogger Script that seems to be able to prevent some major publisher catastrophes and also as a bonus logs all click monitoring on all the links in your website ( BTW this can help you improve the navigation quite a lot if you monitor what’s happening on your website with that script). If you know that you can get hit with something like that it won’t hurt to install it, just to be on the safe side. Its free and its really easy to install. You can download the script from here.

Other than that, just try not to piss of anybody with short temper and this will help you better than any click prevention software because its so easy for a malicious user to copy your publisher id and put it on his own page or even on his computer (where you can’t use any click prevention software) and do the bombing there, so there is no situation where you can cover all possibilities and say that you’re not vulnerable to such attacks.

In all cases, AdSense Click Bombing is a real danger and everyone of us can get hit by it without any warning. The best thing is to monitor what’s happening with your ads every day at least twice so you’ll be aware if something strikes you or not. Don’t think that you can be attacked only in situation where you DID something, because it is possible that someone (most possible competitor) that you don’t even know about can do it on you and try to get your account suspended or even banned. This problem is real and currently we don’t have a good way to fight with it and that’s really sad. One can easily Terrorize your network and we can’t do anything about it. I just hope the AdSense team will find a good way to help publishers fight with this problem.

UpDate: I just got that responce from the AdSense team. Its recomending exactly what I said but still It would be best to see it yourselves.

Hi Venetsian,

Thanks for letting us know about the recent activity on your site. Rest assured that we’ve noted your input, and we’ll continue to monitor the situation closely.

I understand that you’re concerned about keeping your account in good standing, and that you’d like more information about the recent activity on your account. Because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection systems, we’re unable to provide you with any details about your account activity. However, I’ve provided a couple of solutions below
that I hope address your concerns.

1. We encourage you to regularly review your site’s traffic logs for any suspicious activity and notify us of your findings at
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_contact. Please note that there’s no need to alert us of all instances of invalid activity, so we ask that you use your best judgment when reporting unusual activity on your site.

If you need help logging the traffic on your site, we recommend trying these Google search terms:

Webmaster resources
Website tracking and logging
Site traffic analysis

2. You can find tips and guidelines for keeping your account in good standing by visiting our Help Center at
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23921.

3. Another good way to ensure that you don’t generate invalid clicks is by reviewing and remaining in compliance with our Terms and Conditions and program policies:

https://www.google.com/adsense/terms
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies

I realize that you may have questions about what Google is doing to prevent invalid click activity. You should know that our specialists carefully monitor clicks and impressions on Google ads in order to protect your interests as well as those of our advertisers. To do this, we use both automated systems and human reviews, analyzing all ad clicks for any invalid click activity that may artificially drive up an advertiser’s costs or a publisher’s earnings. Please note that according to our Terms and Conditions, Google will use its sole discretion when determining instances of invalid clicks.

Lastly, I wanted to let you know that in the future, we may adjust your payment for any days during which invalid clicks occurred. This helps us protect the integrity of the AdSense program and properly credit advertisers for any invalid activity.

Thanks for your cooperation. We look forward to working with you in the future.

For additional questions, I’d encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question onthe forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group (http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team