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Changing Google AdSense Algorithms May Lead to Site Owners and Webmasters

Practically any modern business needs modern contextual advertising tools, especially Google AdSense. More importantly, this system is the sites that advertise. It would seem that we already know and have learned all the “dirty” tricks on the margins of SEO optimization, raising a website in issuing Google and attacking competitors related to banner advertising, but unscrupulous citizens will come up with something new.

So, on the website krebsonsecurity.com its owner Brian Krebs, an information security specialist, sharedan interesting new method of blackmailing webmasters: through the operation of garbage traffic followed by an automatic ban on the system. Actually, everything is simple, as in the case of crypto ransomware: an attacker requires a ransom in bitcoins in the equivalent of $ 5,000, otherwise he will direct a stream of junk bot traffic to the site, simulating the clumsy activity cheating in order to “master budgets”.



The bottom line is that modern Google AdSense algorithms perceive such activity on the site as fraud and suspend the user's record in the system for a period of one month.

Stopping ads and generally losing access to Google AdSense and its tools is a terrible dream for most webmasters, especially when it comes to resources that exist by displaying ads to users. One of his readers shared a letter from Krebs with a ransomware, the text below:

Very soon, a warning notification will appear at the top of your AdSense account control panel, rest assured! This will happen because we are going to flood your site with a huge amount of bot traffic with a 100% failure rate and thousands of dynamic IP addresses. We’ll have a nightmare for any AdSense user. Moreover, we will configure our more advanced bots so that they endlessly, at different speeds click on each of your AdSense banners and go to the site.

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This method of blackmail in theory may become working, since Google has revised the AdSense algorithms for detecting fraudulent bot traffic in the direction of tightening. According to the webmaster of the potential target of the attack, which sent Brian a letter with threats and a ransom demand of $ 5,000, his AdSense dashboard has actually recently increased the number of failures and the percentage of junk traffic.

At the same time, Google itself says that it’s “working on algorithms and preventing blackmail situations” by webmasters and that fair sites should not be afraid. “We rarely encounter real situations of the described sabotage, although there is a theoretical possibility of such an attack. We have developed special systems to prevent such situations, ”they say at Google.

Also for potential victims of such attacks (it doesn’t matter from ransomware or competitors), Google has made a special feedback form . As advised by AdSense, any site owner or webmaster should suspect a junk traffic attack by reporting this concern through this form.

Representatives of Google are inclined to the fact that attackers try to play on the psychology of site owners and get “compensation” except for the likelihood of getting a block, especially when it comes to a large resource that shows a lot of advertising daily. At the same time, it is still not clear whether there are actually good enough mechanisms and methods for carrying out such attacks, since the very idea of ​​a wave of “junk” traffic to a competitor is far from new. However, usually it all came down to complete paralysis due to the usual DDoS, and now we are talking about a more “delicate” work - simulating fraud using the tools of fraud itself. It is worth remembering that the rules and algorithms of AdSense have also changed (in the direction of tightening), and, as usual, no one knows how.

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