btas2 - 4:43 am on Aug 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

Well, it's Javascript, not Java, and clearly copying and pasting it is OK (what else would you be expected to do with it!).

I'm just wondering if Google does indeed need to see the actual Javascript on the HTML page. If it's served from a .js file, the same data goes to Google as it would if it were copied verbatim into the HTML source.

The only difference would be when Google crawled the page, but does the regular Google crawl have anything to do with Adsense? If Google is using it's regular crawl data to decide which ads to serve for a particular page, I'm not sure why it would need to see the explict Javascript source on the page.

When the call is made to Adsense to download the ads, I presume it knows which page it's coming from and the call transfers exactly the same data as it would if the Javascript was placed directly on the page. If Google has crawled the page, it knows what's there in terms of content and so it knows which ads to serve. None of the data sent by the AdSense Javascript identifies the page it's included on. It just sends account ID and Ad formating information whether it's loaded from a .js file or sits directly on the page. The page ID is sent in the headers I assume and isn't related to the actual Javacript data.