“Our invalid clicks rate – the activity rate – has remained in the range of less than 10% of all clicks every quarter since we launched AdWords in 2002. At Google’s current revenue rate, every percentage point of invalid clicks we throw out represents over $100 million/year in potential revenue foregone.”, says Google’s Inside Adwords Blog.

Yep, that’s $1 billion! Is it really a loss? Because that’s billing that would’ve never occurred anyway, if those were truly fraudulent clicks.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Google. You could even call me a Google fanboy. But when you put it like that, it sounds like Google’s taking a huge hit because of fraud. Doesn’t matter how you say it, sure makes them look like a hero.

If you know what a “blog” is, you probably already know what a “RSS Feed” is.

One of the best (not to forget, cheapest and fastest) ways to get free content for your web site, is to display a third-party RSS Feed. Every time the feed’s content changes, content on your web site automatically changes, thus keeping the content fresh and ever-changing on your site.

This trick can be used for both legit and illegitimate purposes. Sploggers (those who create Splogs – “SPam-filled bLOGS”) often use it to generate thousands of “made for adsense” pages, whose primary intention is to increase PageRank, get ranked higher for highly competitive and high paying keywords, get people to visit their splogs, and manipulating the navigation that they end up leaving by clicking on AdSense (or other PPC) ads.

But if you use it for legitimate purposes, you will find that publishing RSS feeds on your site can be a great way to provide targeted, complementary content for your visitors.

Magpie RSS is a great open-source PHP script that will allow you to easily publish any third-party RSS feed on your site. I have personally tried many RSS scripts, and highly recommend Magpie. I have even used Magpie to create a pretty cool web-based feed-aggregator service, a la Google Reader and Google Personalized home page.

If you want a quick and customizable free script that is based on Magpie, and gives you sample scripts that show you how to publish one, two or more feeds on a page on your web site, go get my Free RSS Feed Publishing script, “FeedMonster”.

- Ravi Jayagopal