inflating page impressions

[hermes]

I understand it being very, very bad news clicking on your own ads. But do people worry about looking at their adsense webpages too much? It says on the google adsense site that you should definitely aim to minimise page impressions. But I tend to look at my webpages quite a lot. When I am editing the pages I am always reloading them to see the changes. I do a lot of my editing up on the server. Should I be worried?

[gendude]

No - ASA and others have said that impressions can't be counted against, because if you're constantly working on your site, you're constantly generating impressions.

I think a lot of us check our sites a few times a day, even if we don't add content, simply to make sure it's running, and to make sure no ads are coming up that you may not care for.

[johnblack]

If you are only making html changes then turn javascript off on your browser and the ads will not appear and no page impression register.

Not a solution if you are testing javascript changes though ;O)

JB

[ann]

Since I emailed Google and opted out of CPM ads I don't worry about how many impressions I create.

[gendude]

It's true, you may want to disable javascript, just so that you know your ad impressions are correct.

My problem, I write about a niche topic that combines two other niche topics (I'm #1 for my topic, etc., etc.). I've caught several ads that were misleading, and targeted directly at my site's topic, and had to go in and block them (and inform Google, although I doubt they did anything).

When I say misleading, somebody was writing ads that mentioned a fictitious product that people interested in my topic would immediately latch on to and click on, which would take them to another site that had no mention of the fictitious product, or wasn't even really related to my site.

It was very clever, and I probably received a good 20 or so emails from people about it, who were not happy (thankfully they understood that I had nothing to do with it).

[hermes]

ASA - is this the adsense google guy on webmasterworld?

[aeiouy]

I just block them from my work computer with the hosts file.

I used to not do this, but sometimes when working on a site I was putting thousands of extra impressions on a page in a day.

It was skewing results, especially on new sites. I have the hosts file linked to my desktop, and actually it is open 90% of the time in notepad. If I need to toggle any of my ads back on I just add or remove a # sign quickly re-save and voila.

I will go through and check ads once in a while, but I didn't find it necessary to be looking at them all the time, and the reality was I was fairly blind to a lot of them, unless I was intentionally looking at them.

[miedmark]

hermes - yes

[jetteroheller]

I think a lot of us check our sites a few times a day

I discuss very often in usenet and forums.
I visit so my sites to have the correct URL of the page, I mention in a discussion.

Also to avoid painfull missunderstoods. Discussing about the unemployment problem in Germany and mentioning a page full of MLM ads can be painful. So I have sometimes also to adjust my URL filter.