NoPlaceLikeHome New feature in Adsense

June 23, 2007

There is a new feature that Google Adsense is implementing. This is taken from Webmaster World updated by AdsenseAdvisor Who is an employee that tries to update in Public (forum):

As NoPlaceLikeHome described, we’re starting to test a new feature that would let publishers choose between allowing any site to display ads with their pub-ID (no change from the current system), and authorizing only a specific list of sites to display their ads. This is separate from the existing Site Authentication feature.

The team thinks this’ll help address a number of issues we’ve heard feedback on, and we hope to release it to all publishers if the testing goes smoothly.

-ASA

What publisher have to say about it?

Thats excellent news. But what would be more interesting would be to filter advertisers by account. Because…

Although you recently banned the majority of the adsense/adwords arbitrage sites (not before time and a HUGE improvement to everything advertiser/google/publisher I might add!) I yesterday removed the 200 old ones I had filtered.

Today I set about re-checking. I have 100+ of the same spam/mfa/arbitrage crowd so far in the filter and I only spent an hour looking. Now they are the same advertisers just using other networks ads. This may well be better for both publishers and advertisers as well as googles credibility but…

The same low quality user experience is there. So I try to filter anyway. I dont want my visitors to think I put these links on my pages.

But most are using the same design and 30 or so domains at a time even in my small niche. It takes hours of work to find them all and then the filter is too full to add the next 50 or so that you find with the same layout and design a few days later.

When can we have better tools or a bigger filter?

But most are using the same design and 30 or so domains at a time even in my small niche. It takes hours of work to find them all and then the filter is too full to add the next 50 or so that you find with the same layout and design a few days later.

Exactly that is the reason I had to remove Adsense from my holiday pages last shopping season - I couldn’t keep up with the flood that kept coming in and replacing the ones I was putting on the filter daily. Same design, same account. Two, as a matter of fact. One was an email harvesting/lead generation operation offering FREE stuff with bogus offers (squeeze pages), the other was just best 5, best 6, best 10. That’s the reason I hesitate to even bother with featuring any holidays any more, and probably won’t until there’s an option to filter by advertiser account, or deceptive “keywords” like FREE.

BTW, holiday or seasonal favorites - like decorations, wedding season,, etc. also cause inappropriate and wasteful specific ads running where they’re completely irrelevant. Pages offering general, non-specific all-purpose widgets will bomb if ads are running specifically for wedding widgets. General “people’s” apparel pages will bomb if ads are running for dog sweaters - and yes, I did once have that happening. And so do completely irrelevant, very specific widget ads run year-round, to the point where I’ll have to take Adsense off the widget pages - which are VERY on topic for the “general” widgets and DO convert, based on a history of sales generated from affiliate links.

Pages that have good potential for converting for advertisers can get killed by inappropriate ad targeting - hence, we know our theme and target audience and should have better filtering capabilities. It would be better for us and definitely for advertisers (who make far more by acquiring new customers than we make for the click), and for the effectiveness of Google’s program on the content network.

If you have 3 websits allow your AS ID to show ad using Google server side white listing:
web1 . com < -- allow
web2 . com <-- allow
web3 . com <-- allow

And 4th is called
steal my content . com <--- ban this site using Google server side black listing.

Many site steals content with AS code. This will avoid those problem.

It would seem that a feature providing the reverse of this could be useful, too: A white list of pub_IDs that are allowed to use AdSense on the sites listed in the account.

I’ve seen a few threads lately about hackers changing pub_ID codes, IT people surreptitiously placing their own IDs on corporate sites, and the like. A flag that raises the alarm when a different pub_ID is used on a site could be helpful.

great news!

1. we can allow only our site to display code
2. we can now have a stat on who might be using our code out there

any word on when full rollout will commence?

In other words if you place your code on three different sites then you could tell G that you knowingly publish on those sites. Then if G comes across a site that is using your AS code it may raise questions about it.

To clarify - yes, this feature would authorize certain sites to display ad code with your publisher ID, as Visit Thailand and iwannano1 describe, not as an advertiser review tool.

even though you might not be legally bound to do so, do you think that perhaps re-evaluating some of those cancelled accounts over the last year might be the “right thing to do”

Any publisher who thinks he/she’s been the victim of sabotage at any point should certainly contact us following the directions here:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=32869

-ASA

Any publisher who thinks he/she’s been the victim of sabotage at any point should certainly contact us following the directions here:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=32869

That deals with invalid clicks. When I tried to find out about where impressions that were not coming from any URLs that I have in my URL Channels were coming from (which should cover everywhere *I* have my AdSense code) they kept telling me to send in my logs for any suspicious activity I noticed. I informed them that the thing that made it suspicious was that they appeared to be coming from somewhere else other than my site, and my logs would not actually show anything.

It took six emails to get the “specialist” to understand this. The advice I got was:

Add Google Analytics
Review my traffic logs
Add Google Analytics (again)
Was told again that clicks were monitored (in response to me saying it wasn’t clicks I was worried about)

I am a very patient person, and very good at getting my point across, but I’m guessing that the kind of replies I got would have frustrated most people into giving up, and with bannings you don’t even have the option of a volley of emails like that (from what I understand, anyways).

My understanding is that people who get banned get exactly one appeal, and if the reason they are being banned is due to a site that is displaying their AdSense code being in violation, they are not told which site that is (I know I was told that letting me know which sites were running my AdSense code would give away proprietary info, which is makes zero sense). Can those who were banned from that at least get a second appeal now, and be allowed to know which site it was that got them banned?

-Michael

This would be a wonderful addition to my toolbox!

I JUST had a case where someone copied one of my sites (including my pub-id) onto an old domain. With this tool, I would have been alerted to it immediately!

I wonder about one thing though: Will the tool be smart enough to allow the Google Cache as an authorized publisher domain without my telling it?

For some really odd strange, stupid reason, AdSense doesn’t look at the URL of a Google search cache request and decode it to understand that it already knows about the cached page. Otherwise it would know exactly what ads to place on the page instead of the random ones that I see when visiting a cache version.

So I worry that if AdSense is unable to understand that the Google IP in a URL for cache requests should be parsed for the original URL, that they won’t automatically also look to the original URL in the cache request to determine domain authority for publishing.

ASA?