3 December 2009 · AdWords, clickspam, Google, testing, web

I've been doing quite a lot of web stuff lately, and this has involved doing link checking on my site. Since it now has AdWords in it, this means my (totally unsophisticated) web crawler has been following the advertisers' links. Oops.

This afternoon I get an email from WellKnownSearchEngine saying:

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on your Google ads, posing a financial risk to our AdWords advertisers. Please note that any activity that may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings is strictly prohibited by our program policies.

You can imagine the rest. Dire Warnings, Serious Threats, and so on, coupled with a refusal to offer specifics. So I just thought I'd ask: what tools do you use use for link-checking, and how do you avoid this issue?