The impossible has finally happened, the three major search giants have teamed up to recognize, gauge and combat their common enemy, click fraud. The big three will be joined in their efforts to fight off the evil forces of click fraud with Ask.com and Looksmart.com.

The problem of click fraud has obviously escalated to such a point that these three search companies, who vigorously complete against one and other, and often have very little positive to say about each other are willing to collaborate on eliminating the threat. The search engines are very well aware that sponsored advertising is in great jeopardy. The more publicity click fraud gets, the more difficult it will be for any of these companies to reach out and renew their current subscribers. The numbers are staggering, Google, by it self, earned $1.3 billion on paid advertising revenue through the first two quarters of this year alone.

As has been well documented on this blog, click fraud has accounted for several class action law suites against Google and Yahoo. Google recently settled their suit, while Yahoo has made a settlement offer and is awaiting a trial date to make its case.

According to a report August 2, 2006 in the Washington Post, “John Slade, senior director of Yahoo's defense against click fraud, predicted the alliance's guidelines ‘will be a game-changing step in measuring and fighting click fraud.’"

Perhaps the biggest problem is there is no single definition for the term, “click fraud”. However, in all cases, the final outcome is inevitably the same: Advertisers are paying for traffic by those who have absolutely no intention of ever purchasing anything from their site, but whose only goal is to consume large amounts of their competitor’s online marketing budget. If the big three can just put a label on “click fraud” they will then be able to start to detect exactly what the financial damages are and put their engineers to work on resolving the issue.

The above blog was written by Mike Goldstein, SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media.