So, I have a conundrum. My adsense account is showing clicks that aren’t showing as views. They don’t appear in my URL channels or any of my other defined channels. On the one hand, I don’t mind a few extra clicks here and there, but it’s a fine line. If, for instance, those clicks and views are from a URL that has nudity or violence on them, I would be in violation of the Adsense TOS. If they aren’t, then I could just let them go for ever and rack up the money.
I don’t know whether they are from old sites that are cached, or revenue share sites that I submitted my ID to, or if someone has jacked my Publisher ID for some odd reason. And I’d like to find out. Which is where the problem surfaces. I can’t find a good way to find the URLs. I could turn on the “Allowed” URL feature in adsense, but that feature has some limitations that I don’t really want to deal with. The biggest being that it’s limited to only 100 allowed URLs. I don’t have anywhere near 100 sites, but if you were to try and allow all the Google cache sites, you’d quickly surpass that limit and you’d be losing out on some very valid adsense impressions and possibly some clicks too.
I’ve tried to search via Google with my publisher ID, but since the code is in Javascript, I can’t find anything. I found a site a few weeks ago that would somehow do it, but it was a paid site. I’m cheap, so I passed it up. Of course, I can’t remember what site it was either. I’d still like to find a free way to do it. If they can do it for a paid site, there has to be a way to do it, so what is it?
Anyone ever done anything like this? I tried to ask Matt Cutts on Twitter (@mattcutts), but he didn’t respond. Either he doesn’t know, he sicked the Google KGB on me for a shady question, or he missed the question, or he’s ignoring me. Any way you crack it, it doesn’t help me.
About Shane Ede
If you know about this already then skip my advice below.
While this won’t solve the problem you described with the past, the following will prevent it from happening in the future. Go to Allowed Sites inside Adsense manager and make sure only sites you authorize are listed there. This way if your adsense ID is jacked then Google will not consider this a website that used your adsense with permission.
Yeah, I’m aware of that and it’s my plan b. I was hoping to avoid having to do that though. The thought of forgetting to add a URL or not being able to put enough in the list scares me a little.
Not enough? lol How many domains you own? I think they allow 200 domains, don’t they?
Lol. Not that many. I think the limit is 100, and I’ve only got about 30-35, and only about 10 of those I run adsense on. The problem arises when you get sites that cache your adsense. It’s still your content and your ads, but if you want to ad each server that that cache might come off of, you end up hitting the limit pretty quickly. Google would be the best example. They have hundreds of cache servers.
I don’t have answer about your problem. But keep your try to avoid violation of Adsense TOS.
Hey bandisusi,
I agree with you. Yea, try to keep avoid violation of Adsense TOS.
thatedeguy – maybe we’re mixing each other up here, but your last comment kinda confused me.
The whitelist I was talking about is for *your* sites. If you only whitelist your domains running adsense it doesn’t matter how many other sites cache your pages and code, those clicks won’t generate income nor will Google see them as yours if they violate the Adsense TOS.
So that’s what I meant by how many domains you own. If you own less than the whitelist allows, you’re all good 🙂
TDavid, yeah, we’re crossing streams. “Whatever you do, don’t cross the streams!”
I understand that it’s a whitelist and no, I don’t have enough domains to fill it up. My concern is that if I don’t include the google cache urls, that I will lose income *because* they aren’t on the list. I know that I’ll get the income and impressions from the ones on the list, it’s the unknown caches and such that I’m worried about not being able to add.
I began using the allowed sites function since my last comment and am planning on doing a post about it later. Stay tuned!
well hopefully it’s not a TOS issue… I’ve been pretty disappointed w/ adsense lately even considering the weak economy/ad market. Very low CPMs and low click thru rates, bad combo.
I have the same problem, and tried everything but i didn get any positive answer i am looking for, any suggestion on this would help me to