Yahoo Sued for 1 Mil for Neglecting Click Fraud

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Yahoo! Sued For $1 Mil For Neglecting Click Fraud!

By: Navneet Kaushal
2008-04-18

According to a post at Search Engine Round Table, Bigreds.com has sued online marketing giant Yahoo! for a total of $1 million. It claims that...

...Yahoo! Services did very little to prevent the click fraud that was happening at the Bigreds website, inspite of repeated notifications and complaints.

Bigreds is in the business of selling collectibles online and it said that, it had paid Overture Services which is a Yahoo! Search Engine Marketing Unit more than $900,000 over the span of four years (2002-2006). This fees was calculated on the number of clicks that the Bigreds advertisements received on Yahoo! and Overture affiliated websites.

In the court papers filed at U.S. District Court in New York, Bigreds said, These clicks were not actual traffic, but were fraudulent clicks. Affiliates of Overture used software programs, employed people, and/or directed people other than actual customers to click on plaintiffs links from keyword search results"

According to Bigreds, in the year 2006, Yahoo! did agree that there existed a click fraud problem. However, it only agreed to a sum of $17,000 as a refund. Furthermore, Yahoo's Overture unit at that time had access to technology and measures to prevent the click fraud, but it did nothing about the problem.

In the law suit, Bigreds also claim that, Overture was able to tell what was bad, who conducted the bad click, where it came from, what keyword was involved and generally had superior technology and access to records in its dominion that enabled Overture to determine what persons or entities or affiliates were involved.

Similar incidents of click fraud have happened earlier as well with both Yahoo! and Google. In 2005, Yahoo! had to pay $4.5 million to settle a click fraud class action lawsuit. In another similar case settlement, Google had to shed a massive $90 million.

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Tag: Yahoo, click fraud

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About the Author:
Nav is the founder and CEO of PageTraffic, a premier search engine company known for its assured SEO service, web design and development, copywriting and full time SEO professionals.

Navneet has wide experience in natural search engine optimization, internet marketing and PPC campaigns. He is a prolific writer and his articles can be found in the "Best Articles" section of many websites and article banks. As a search engine analyst , he has over 9 years of experience and his knowledge is in application here.


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