potentialgeek - 2:08 am on Feb 27, 2009 (gmt 0)

I just happened to Google my AdSense publisher ID a short time ago--not sure why, just curiosity, I guess--and, low and behold, I find a domain company has been crawling the web with its bots, paying special attention to the Adsense ID of each website it crawls. Then it automatically compiles a list of every single website that uses that ID.

I can't reveal the URL of the company doing it, but you may want to see if your ID has been lifted from your site. (I checked somebody else's ID found via View Source, but Google doesn't have it indexed in SERPs.)

Hmmm... not sure it's a bad thing for me personally, but I do have a mixture of websites some of which are personal, some only business. That's because Google only lets publishers have one account, and that has been its strict policy for a long time/always.

In a related issue, it seems the same website that harvests your Google AdSense information also looks at Google Analytics IDs--the UA number.

Is it impossible for Google to give publishers privacy? Couldn't the snippet of Google Adsense code be set up by domain instead of the ID tag?

I don't know how many publishers would be interested in this but I suspect potentially a few. The bad news is I don't know of anything that can be done immediately on the publishers' side to enable privacy.

Speaking of privacy, even if you have Domain Privacy for every domain but one in your portfolio, but each domain gives away your AdSense ID, people can find out who you are via this site. This is good to know for anyone with a controversial site amongst a large portfolio of domains!

p/g