Many of you familiar with ad serving programs like adsense and it’s not a secret how it works (in general) - ads block automatically shows relevant ads for the page user is surfing. In order to know what ads are relevant to the page’s content, google “Mediapartners” bot needs to fetch the page, and “fetching” here means sending a GET HTTP request to it. So when users visits page that is not in adsense cache (and “visits” here again means sending GET HTTP request), mediaparners bot receives command to fetch this new page. Now lets leave the user with his browser alone and lets see what really happens. The situation is that anybody can send GET HTTP request to google to make google bot to send arbitrary GET HTTP request anywhere he wants, using google bot as a proxy. The magic url looks like that (copy link location to see), where url parameter have to be url-encoded address, but to make things more fun I’ve created small javascript form that allows you to send zombie with a click of a button.
Notes:
Mediapartners google bot is not indexing google bot (though they share content cache, also here), so if you are thinking about fast-indexing your pages, this will not work.
If page is already in adsense cache, this will not work (you can try non-existent pages).
Note that this proof of concept code is supplied for educational purposes only.
Shoemoney reports his ringtoneslovestory. Give us a couple of ref links Jeremy!
I imagine army of hundreds of stooping red-eyed ppc marketers started to type word “ringtones” into their favorite keyword suggestion tools right now. Jeez.
It turns out that GA keywords CPD distribution is more flat that I thought and does not follow 80/20 Pareto rule - on this scale (for some reason I had the idea that 80/20 proportion is scale-free, which is absolutely not always true). However, on the much bigger scale with total 1.5 million keywords having $12405263 daily budget situation changes completely and we have 1% of all keywords that cost 75% of daily budget. Top 1000 makes, correspondingly, 40% of total cost (and therefore of total Adwords income, which is proportional thing). So what to choose, the fat part or the long tail? Data collected from Google Adwords with 44 million keywords database - autumn 2006 (got it here).
Probably everybody noticed that PPC business model is extremely vulnerable to click fraud. This follows from simple fact, that faking real person browsing/clicking with automated clickbot is task far from impossible. Having on the other side impressive money making opportunities makes PPC fraud one of the fanciest blackhat online businesses nowadays, but interesting part is that increasing fraud leads to advertisers paying less money for clicks, which the leads to affiliates increase fraud to make at least the same amount of money, which makes advertisers lower bids etc. And because fair competitors cannot compete with this scheme, at the end of the day there are only clickers and advertisers paying $1 for 1000 uniques (and looking for CPA programs) who left. And this was going and going on for years - and PPC still exists. World is full wonders.
Starting new things was always giving me some kind of headache, as it’s sometimes not so easy to find an appropriate name (creativity lags), and name is important, as it affects the whole attitude towards the project from the beginning and during its whole lifetime. It should be original and unique and in the same time it should reflect general idea of what this all about. This blog is about internet marketing, search engines, SEO (Firefox spellchecker still doesn’t know this word) and traffic management. Hello.
