Click-Fraud and Comment Spam

Google emphatically denied that they just "let click fraud happen." Google may have tons of products and services, but they still get most of their revenue from AdSense.

Click-fraud happens when companies conspire to either artificially raise the number of clicks on a site where they host ads, so they increase their own revenue, or when companies conspire to click on their competition's ads, so their competition has to pay more for them. Either way, it's clearly in Google's best interest to stop it.

Rival Microsoft, in what I'm sure was a friendly gesture, pointed out that Google should also be very concerned with Blogger and comment spam. Comment spam is left in random, unrelated blogs and usually looks like ads or says "come visit my site" with link to a site with ads. The spam's purpose is to increase the Google rankings for a site used to park ads for advertising revenue.

Such sites and comments are annoying to consumers and annoying to advertisters. I had to shut off the guest book on both my website and my husband's business website, because too many spam comments were clogging them up, and I've run into message boards that were practically unreadable from all the comment spam.

If you want to prevent spam comments in your blog, Google suggests using the "nofollow" tag to prevent spam commenters from being rewarded, but I'd also suggest turning on the word verification option for Blogger to make sure all your comments are left by humans.