Blocked Reference URL and Click Fraud

I was looking over the ref URLs for the visitors to this blog the other day. Its interesting to see which keywords cause Tumbling Duke to rank high in organic search results.

There's always a fair amount of traffic coming from a Google search on 'Google Stock Units'. It turns out that the number one result from Google when searching for 'Google Stock Units' is my post.

How can that be? I checked my PageRank and it's zero. How does my post rank above the WSJ article that talks about these things? Interesting....

Anyway, I noticed that some of my log entries have a blocked ref URL and some are messages like 'No Ref For You!!' Which got me curious about how someone did that.

Quick search for Ref URL block got me to stardrifter.org and their Firefox extension that blocks the Ref URL. For privacy reasons, I now run RefControl to block my Ref URLs as well.

Now that I block Ref URLs, I'm pretty sure my AdWord click throughs will get tagged as fraudulent. I think I prefer that. I never click on Google ads since I'm usually not interested in any purchase and feel bad about wasting the advertisers money. From now on though, that will probably change.

I wonder what would happen if blocking Ref URLs was a standard feature in Firefox and IE?