If some asshole wants to get your account banned he can just click your ads over and over all day long. Then YOU get banned for click fraud.

Why doesn't google just log the IPs of each click and if it sees many clicks from the same IP, just invalidate those clicks but not ban your account.

I believe they do. I got credited for about 10 clicks yesterday and I am seeing my competitor is no longer in my keyword group. Could be coincidence, but we'll see.

They do this, this is how they can even justify a ban. I also think Google is using their search engine data towards their advertising program to determine the legitimacy and marketability of clicking users, I think they rather account long-term data sheets over short-term, so some idiot randomly deciding to click your ads probably will just be discounted by Google and that's it. Adsense being my third contributing income source, I'm sure it's not that easy. If you start your adsense account off with the intentions of defrauding Google this will be your long-term data sheet, and it goes without saying you will be banned and not paid.

i have no intention of defrauding them. I just keep hearing stories from people in forums about "oh yeah, this guy got pissed at me and went to my site and clicked my ads all day and now I'm banned."

Unless all those people are lying about what happened...

Me too, I keep hearing the same site-revenge click happy stories that end up with the account holder, not the perpetrator, being banned. So what's the actual story here? How do you put your faith (and substantial dollars) in a system that allows this? Is there a method or php script or tracking analytic or something that we can use to monitor this for oursleves? Now THAT would be cool.

I don't know their motives but something is inconsistent with their stories - from my experience and other members' whom I've spoken to there hasn't been problems. To be honest, they're most likely lying (probably tried to get their household members and not-so-distant cousins to click their ads). I don't doubt that there are genuine cases of misunderstanding and abuse though. I know Google's system is better this time around, I just joined the program in 2008 - so I don't know how things were done before that. I believe Google engages in vigorous profiling and tracking, what they do with that info is beyond me. I use a custom script to counter any possible bomb attack, although I'm sure Google's smart detection technology is top-notch. I always keep my sites away from forums, and completely dispatched from my business identity.

P.S. - I've never experienced a clickbomb, all of my sites are separated and comprising of different niches. They each receive small and pace UV's each day but it all adds up. The user below suggests sending your logs to Google, this is a good idea which I always hear people succeeding with and maintaining their relationship with G.

Originally Posted by No Limits

Me too, I keep hearing the same site-revenge click happy stories that end up with the account holder, not the perpetrator, being banned. So what's the actual story here? How do you put your faith (and substantial dollars) in a system that allows this? Is there a method or php script or tracking analytic or something that we can use to monitor this for oursleves? Now THAT would be cool.

Yeah look for weird activity in your logs.... I always check my statcounter.com log and my google analytics log once a day for weird activity or a lot of clicks from same user. On several occasions I have had people click on my ads 15+ times within a 4 hour period all I did was send their IP address, time of incident, and offered full access to my logs and let google know. BTW: I still got paid for the bulk of the invalid clicks I reported

Check the IPs log and just ban them from your site, problem solved!