Google are always looking to improve the quality of traffic that is filtered through their search engine, if advertisers are receiving invalid traffic that is costing them money, it will harm the results that said advertiser has received and ultimately could provide them with unsuccessful Ad words results.
On Tuesday Google reinforced their existing botnet protections, specifically targeting three of the top fraud botnets amongst others.
Ad fraud botnets are masses of malware infected computers which are used by malicious fraudsters that are determined to generate a huge amount of non-human traffic in high volumes. It is believed that their are hundreds of thousands of infected computers around the globe that are being used this way, the threat is substantial and this is why Google have taken them seriously.
Botnet traffic is extremely difficult for Google to identify as their behaviour will resemble legitimate traffic as much as possible such as using common browsers & scrolling.
However overall this is another step into making the advertising platform as safe as possible and Google ensuring that even more of advertisers budget is protected can only be a positive thing.
