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Some time ago, in more “dubious” sites (porn, cracks, etc.), you’d usually see ads (usually for porn) and, near them, messages telling people to “click here to support the site”, and variants of that.

These days, such messages aren’t so common, especially in more “legitimate” sites, where AdSense is allowed. In fact, those are against the AdSense terms of service, and, so, people who attempt to use them are eventually banned from the service.

Still, there are still people who ask, using other methods, to click on ads: by mail (e.g. mailing lists), or by asking friends.

However, if you don’t want to lose AdSense forever (including any money you have already accumulated), don’t do it!

Why? Because, if I were Google, and I wanted to battle click fraud, I’d easily find a way to fight those two methods of “artificial clicks”. Now, if I can do it, it stands to reason that they can do it much better, right?

In the “mail to a site or forum’s readers asking them to click on ads once or twice a day” case, what would it cause? Some tens or hundreds of particular users clicking on ads in the same site, regularly. That would, of course,create an easily detectable pattern, which they’d be able to detect with a simple script.

Asking friends to click, on the other hand, will often make them think “I’ll click a bunch of times, to help the guy.” An user clicking 20 times, in a couple of seconds, on ads on the same site? I think they can certainly detect that. I would.

In fact, in the past, I’ve had to ask friends not to do that anymore, because, trying to help me, they were doing it on their own initiative… and I, myself, detected it on the AdSense stats. Fortunately, the “guilty parties” told me about it (after all, they were trying to help), and I was able to ask them to stop.

In short: non-natural ad clicks are relatively easy to detect. Never ask anyone to do them, or you risk saying goodbye to AdSense for good.

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