Click fraud has been in the spotlight quite a bit in the last six months. Click fraud is generally considered to be "clicks made with bad faith with the sole purpose of generating a charge to the advertiser with zero possibility of a legitimate site visit or transaction occurring." Earlier this week, search influencer Jeffrey K. Rohrs put out an open letter dubbed the "Sausage Manifesto" to paid search networks like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, Ask.com and others, asking about the problem and what companies like ours are doing to address it.

Yahoo! Search Marketing's Senior Director of Product Management John Slade posted a preliminary comment in response and we didn't want you to miss it:

Hi Jeff,

John Slade from Yahoo! here. On behalf of the entire team, just wanted to jump in and say that I really appreciate your opening up this forum because (yes, it’s true!) we at Yahoo! want more dialogue too. We’re more than happy to participate in this discussion because we firmly believe that open communication - along with real commitment - is the best way this industry can get ahead of the click fraud issue.

I’m going to post in more detail on this blog in the coming days, but wanted to start off by reassuring you and your readers that Yahoo! agrees that click fraud is a serious challenge. We as marketing professionals shouldn’t spend any more time arguing about whether click fraud is a problem or what percentage it is. Any amount of money – no matter how small - lost as a result of click fraud is worthy of our attention. So we believe the more important discussion is, How can we better identify it and fight it?

I know I’ve said this many times on conference panels and in interviews, but I can’t state enough that tolerating click fraud is NOT the path to long term success as a search engine. We know that the ongoing growth of this industry hinges entirely on the ROI we deliver to our advertisers -- if we don’t filter out click fraud, our customers will lower their bids or reduce their spend with us. I think I speak on behalf of my colleagues at Google, MSN, Ask.com and others when I say that click fraud does nothing but erode the trust that businesses have in our medium, and we want to put a stop to it.

Click fraud isn’t going to be solved by any one company and it sure as heck isn’t going to be addressed with a single solution. Tracking, filtering, standards or lawsuits alone aren’t the answer. There are multiple facets to this problem and we need to fight it together – search engines, advertisers, agencies, tool providers, researchers - on multiple fronts.

With that belief in mind, Yahoo! is working hard to put our money where our mouth is. We proactively identify suspicious clicks and remove them from our billing system 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- as a result, we’ve given away billions of clicks for free. We’ve invested significant technological, financial and human resources in clickthrough protection since we started this industry in 1998 and are redoubling our efforts by dedicating even more resources to this issue. You’ll be hearing more specifics from us soon, but I can tell you that we have in fact committed to building a Traffic Quality Resource Center, are continually expanding our clickthrough protection team and will be announcing new leaders within our organization who will focus entirely on enhancing and overseeing our traffic quality initiatives.

I know there’s a lot more discussion to be had and many more questions to answer, so you’ll be hearing more from me and others at Yahoo! as this forum evolves. I look forward to reading additional perspectives from our fellow industry colleagues (thanks for taking the first plunge, Andrew!), and will make sure to keep everyone apprised of our developments on this front.

John Slade
Sr. Director, Product Management
Yahoo! Search Marketing