As every last cent is squeezed out of advertisers and affiliate opportunities, and shared between the hundreds of paid-to-read programs available now, it is becoming increasingly difficult for those PTR webmasters to generate revenue. Many such webmasters have employed a wide variety of techniques to boost income, but as some become increasingly desperate, it is little wonder that some try to cheat the system.
Before explaining the problem of iframe cheaters, it is first necessary to outline why it is such a problem that some webmasters choose to bite the hand that feeds them. The principal victims of this kind of behaviour are pay-per-click search engines, used by many paid-to-read sites to provide search links. Every time you, as a member of the PTR site, make a valid search through the provided search link, that PTR site earns a few cents. Such search links have become the lifeblood of many honest PTR sites, serving as an extremely useful income supplement to the sparse purchases made by 'real' advertisers. If dishonest PTR webmasters cheat the search engines in the following way, search engines are likely to withdraw this opportunity for honest webmasters - resulting in fewer paid links for members, and a weakened PTR industry - the last thing anyone needs right now.
An iframe is a web page loaded within another web page. An example of an iframe used in a legitimate way can be seen below. It acts as a window, so you may see another web page without leaving the one you are currently browsing.
Example of an iframe
The possibility of cheating occurs because the web page creator can decide the size of the iframe. For example, a slightly different sized example of the above iframe can be seen below.
A smaller example of an iframe
Some dishonest webmasters have added iframes to their pages, showing other sites in windows as shown above. However, they have made them so small that the human eye cannot possibly see them. In other words, the iframe is loading, and the page hit for the site within the iframe window counts, although the window page can not be seen by any visitor. Many dishonest webmasters send fake traffic like this to their search portal pages.
You may be wondering what the point of this is. After all, if the window pages cannot be seen then no one will be able to search using these pages, and so no money will be earned. There appears to be two ways in which some sites use this to their advantage.
One way, possibly the most unscrupulous, is to load automatic scripts within these hidden windows, in order to give the appearance that the visitor has searched, even though they never saw the search portal. In this way, the dishonest PTR webmaster earns his money through cheating, and the honest PTR sites suffer as a result.
The second way dishonest webmasters use these frames is to simply send traffic to their portal pages, without any searching taking place. Although this may mean that no searches actually take place and no money is directly earned, this amount of fake traffic means it is more difficult for the search engines to detect click fraud, where the PTR site forces its members to make searches. This makes sense; if the PTR site forces searches on its members, their percentage of searches made per search portal visit will be very high. This may make it very obvious to the search engine that they are cheating. However, this percentage goes down if they send a lot of fake traffic to the portal pages. They earn the same amount of money, but are not as easily detected and caught when committing click fraud.
This is clearly a prevalent problem. A directory of images showing the extent of this, how this is done, and naming some offenders can be seen at http://jutaky.no-ip.org/iframes/. At the end of the day the people hurt most by this are the honest webmasters of search engines and PTR sites, and so in turn their members, who as always end up losing out.
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