The Manipulation of Search Engine Technology in Advertising

Locating the brand also face changes in web search engine marketing which includes spam, fierce competition and fraud click. One of the effective ways of audience acquisition strategy is search engine marketing (SEM), SEM allow firms to advertise their product on search engines (Boughton, 2005). World Wide Web (WWW) is a service that facilitates internet users to find content through search engine (TechoPedia, 2019). The user can just enter or type any keywords or key phrases in the search engine and get results list or SERP in many forms, such as websites, videos and images. The results page of the search engine (SERP) is the list of content returned to a user through a search engine. Manipulating ads placement in different search engine rankings are a norm for some web authors. This activity is called spam. However, traditional information retrieval did not contain spam, which makes not may previous research to fully avoid spam in search algorithms. A small marketer with limited budget in a vast market is impossible to stay in the game and compete with others. On the contrary, a big company have the capital needed to stay in the top and monopoly the top position of a keyword. For example, when an individual search the word ’new car model’, the top company’s new car model will be the first to pop up. As a result, the big company have a bigger advantage on having the capital to own the top search position. Search engine marketing is an intense market which create a competitive community to use many tactics to grasp the top position, one of them is fraud click.

Fierce competition in search marketing causing advertiser to switch over to a smaller search engine to lower costs of click and avoid traffic (Boughton, 2005). The smaller search engines share their revenue with their sites each time their ads were clicked on. Frequently, the advertisers do not know what sites their ads appeared (Henzinger, Motwani, & Silverstein, 2002). Click fraud causing an unfairness among marketers because they experience difference between number of clicks purchased and clicks recorded. There are two types of click fraud, which are competitor fraud and affiliate fraud. Competitor fraud is when a competitor repeatedly click on their opponent advertisers’ sponsored links just to make the opponent’s daily ad budget decreases. Meanwhile, affiliate fraud refers to increasing compensation by repeatedly clicking on the affiliate program. This issue occurred in small and major search engines. Due to the increasing number of consumers with high-speed internet, the page load time is a less of an issue. Services such as Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP are designed to make online experience better, quicker and pain-free.