A SEO friend asked me about the content network yesterday. Content network is a hip word people like to throw around when they are hanging out with thier friends, kind of similar to geotargeting. Really, most know little about the content network and view it as a black hole that sucks away thier budget. In many ways, they are right. When I hear the words content network, I cringe. Sometimes I think of the content network as a bunch of Black Donnellys mobster types sitting around a dingy bar all day counting their cash and talking about where is the best place to hide assault rifles.

Disclaimer – There are many fine publishers who work to provide relevant advertisements embedded within unique content. This article does not apply to you. I have nothing to say but good things about what you do, and sirs, do not change a thing.

That out of the way, his question was this – “My Uncle Buck is doing some PPC for his site and is getting some non-converting traffic. For example, one site has referred 24 total visits, with an average of 1.0 pages viewed per visitor, and another site with 133 total visits and an average of 1.02 page views per visitor. Neither site has any conversions. Is this from Adsense or Adwords, and what can he do about it? Basically he doesn’t want to pay for referrals from these crappy sites.”

My friend, I was once like you. There was no way to identify where the traffic was coming from, or to stop traffic from those sites. The easiest way to identify possible click fraud or fraudulent sites is to look at the number of pages viewed per visitor. Sure, it’s possible that every now and then someone will come to your site, be totally uninterested and leave without viewing another page. But look at the first site; it had 24 visitors without a single person looking at another page. And the second site was equally as bad with an amazing 133 visitors, but no one is browsing past the landing page the site. This data alone should be enough to report to Google and ask for a refund from obviously fraudulent clicks. That can be a timely process with little benefit, so the best thing is just be sure to shut them off totally.

When Buck looked back as his log files, he was able to identify which sites were sending the non converting traffic. One of the sites as just listed as an IP address – 67.29.139.199. I later found out that other people had problems with this as well, and it was actually an IP owned by click fraud ridden ABCSearch. Read more about there spammy practices here.

The other site was another crap site I have never heard of called SearchFeed. Take a look at this site. It provides nothing for the user other than a search box that returns only PPC ads. I can’t see any legitimate customer coming from this site with the intention of buying whatever you’re selling.

So to answer his question, this traffic is coming from the content network, so it’s adsense ads. If Buck goes to an adgroup and clicks on the summary tab, it will show him the separation between what is coming from the search network (Google Adwords) and the content net work (Adsense).

If Buck wants to turn off the content network for the whole campaign (you can’t do it just for the adgroup) go into Edit Settings for the campaign and uncheck the box next to content network. If he still wants to run some content ads, I would recommend he check the box for content network, then check the next box for “let me separate prices for content clicks.” Then on that summary tab of each ad group, he can click ‘edit’ next to his content network bid and lower it. This is a good idea because usually content bids are lower than search bids.

Finally, at the top of the page that lists all of his ad groups in a campaign, there is a link at the top that that says “add excluded sites.” Then a box comes up where he can put in the URL of sites he doesn’t want traffic from. This will block your ads from those sites for the entire campaign. Buck would have to do this for each campaign in the account.

So there you go Uncle Buck. LifeintheBlue at your service. The point is that there are worthless sites all over the internet. They exist for no other reason than to display PPC ads and steal legitimate advertising dollars. Advertising on these sites will leave you with a depleted budget and no conversions. The greater issue here is that Google and Yahoo need to work to shut down this practice all together, but, in the meantime follow my advice and you will be living a life in the blue.