The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization and Fair Isaac will partner on preparing an in-depth study on click fraud.

DM News reported on the SEMPO and Fair Isaac pairing, which will attempt to fill the need for an authoritative study on click fraud.

"We found that the level of concern about click fraud year over year went up ... and that one of the major concerns advertisers have is the value they are getting from search," SEMPO chairman Gord Hotchkiss, also known for his work at Enquiro, said in the report.

To help construct the study, members of SEMPO can choose to contribute click-stream data to the project, the article said.

The project will provide analysis of that data for possible click fraud.

The potential of click fraud disrupting the legitimate business of search marketing poses concerns to the companies that profit handsomely from it.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all make billions annually from search advertising.

Concerns about click fraud, where advertisers pay for ad clicks that come from unscrupulous sources instead of legitimate web traffic, has grown in scope.

Google settled a click fraud lawsuit in Arkansas for $90 million. Yahoo has faced accusations of spyware-powered click fraud occurring with its Overture campaigns.

These and other concerns have led to calls for greater transparency into the operations of the search engines.

Due to the potential for exposing trade secrets, those calls have been rebuffed. But with the billions involved in search advertising, the search engine companies will continue to face demands for greater access to information related to click fraud.

At one time, advertisers were not as concerned about click fraud. SEMPO's report on The State of Search Engine Marketing for 2004 found that marketers believed spam in search results posed more of a problem than click fraud.

Smaller marketers demonstrated more concern than bigger ones in SEMPO's study on the topic of click fraud. The concerns marketers expressed about search spam have probably been supplanted by click fraud for reasons like the growth in the number of search advertisers, and improvements in the ways search engines handle spam.

Junk results in the search engines have been a complaint of users and marketers alike. Companies like Google and Yahoo solicit feedback from their users regarding their search engines, and dedicate resources to improving those results.

I spend in the neighborhood of 25K - 30K in PPC advertising a month between several clients in both Google and Yahoo. Recently we have diverted 90% of our advertising funds from Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture) to Google because of click fraud that has gone out of control in Yahoo.

We pain stakingly record and analyze on an hourly basis each click received through our PPC campaigns. Starting in December 2005 we started getting pounded by Yahoo "affiliate" websites that displayed pornographic links and images. Our site has absolutely nothing to do with pornography and we were disgusted that our Yahoo listings were showing up on these sites. All of a sudden we also started getting clicks only on SPECIFIC high bid keyphrases from third world countries IP addresses. These visitors land on our landing pages and never, ever, ever go anywhere else on the site. They hit the landing page and then disappear. The clicks typically come in batches and are always from IP addresses from remote remote third world locations. They are however, always from the same Yahoo affiliate sites! And always for the same high bid keyphrases. It never varies.

To this day we still receive about 30 fraudulent clicks a day from Yahoo affiliates such as healthexquisiteness.com, and teen.net, and several other nefarious Yahoo affiliate outfits that are scamming us and doubtless other advertisers to the tune of 1000's of dollars a day. They are really cleaning up on this major hole in Yahoo's "click fraud protection" system. And Yahoo could care less. Believe me, I've spent hours on the phone with these people.

We complained to Yahoo and sent multi-GB server log files to prove we were getting ripped off to Yahoo. On a regular basis they make very small refunds to us and then claim that the clicks are legitimate and that nothing suspicious is going on!

I was also told by a Yahoo executive that affiliates are not supposed to have pornography on their websites that display Yahoo listings. On teen.net they turned off the porn (according to the Exec after we complained), but it is still completely suggestive and porn in my opinion. And our site still gets clicked on every single hour of the day from this Yahoo affiliate. In fact healthexquisiteness.com is also increasing their fraud for the same specific keyphrases.

This doesn't matter to Yahoo however. I am told over and over that all is well and things are just the way they should be. I was even told at one point that we were being clicked on because the affiliate sites were pornographic and people must have thought our site was too. Unbelievable. And in the same breath they told me the clicks were legitimate even though it is against Yahoo's affiliate policies for affiliate sites to display listings on pornographic sites.

If there is a list for people to sign up for a class action suit against Yahoo and their horrible affiliate/click fraud protection lies please let me know. I have GB's of logs proving our click fraud from Yahoo's affiliates.