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I won’t believe it until I hear either JenSense or Matt Cutts say it, but according to a leaked Press Release posted over at Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense AdSense publishers can now click their own ads without fear of being banned form the money making program.

According to the press release posted on Eric Giguere’s blog-

“Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it was removing prohibitions that prevented AdSense publishers from clicking Google-supplied ads on their own sites. (AdSense is Google’s contextual advertising program; it allows third party sites unrelated to Google to display advertisements placed by advertisers using the Google AdWords program.) This follows statements yesterday by Google CEO Eric Schmidt that click fraud is not something that Google shareholders should worry about.” more…

This will be very welcome news for publishers, especially the smaller sites who may click on their own ads out of curiosity, without fully understanding the implications of doing so.

In case you didn’t read the date of this post, Eric is just having a little fun here.

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A pretty interesting read this morning over at Wired.com by Charles C. Mann.

For those of you unfamilar with the term click-fraud, it is all explained here.  So is the potential impact of this problem ballooning out of control.

Google, Yahoo!, and the other major PPC firms have found themselves
caught in a game of cat and mouse with its perpetrators. Even as the
search engines shore up their defenses, click scammers are becoming
more sophisticated, increasingly deploying complex software to disguise
the origins of clicks. For now, the search companies and many of their
clients maintain that the problem on their networks is under control.
But some observers, like Holcomb, believe that click fraud is “a
billion-dollar mess” that “has the potential of destroying the entire
industry.”

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WebProNews.com have a great article up regarding Google AdSense click-fraud - a growing problem for Advertisers, Publishers, and Google too. Focusing in on the publishers themselves, the article describes the different types of unscrupulous operators who are out there to prey on the advertisers..

The article describes 4 types of click-fraud artists:

• Regressive Fraudster (aka ClickMonkey)
• Wanna -Be Fraudster (aka BOZO)
• Almost-There Fraudster (aka SmartAlec)
• Fraudster Maestro (aka Satan’s Spawn)

This category of fraudsters deserves a taxonomy of its own, which we have developed (the other categories, click fraud and impression fraud are even bigger problems in some industries). In the interest of not being gender biased, we have alternated between genders. We hope that our lighthearted tone does not mask the revulsion that we feel towards these cheats.

Click here to read Google AdSense Fraud - How To Protect Your PPC Account.

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