Review your ads

Spam spam spam

[Thez]

I just spent an hour going through just about all ads displayed on my site. I usually block ads that are off topic of course, but this time I checked all of the URLs as well and I ended up blocking almost all ads that are showing up constantly.

My site is about music, mainly instruments like guitar, bass, etc. Majority of the ads displayed are these "learn guitar fast" ads. They all look good, inviting, and people click them.

I found 7 ads with different copy and affiliate id advertising the very same program. I found 4 MFA ads to sites which had copied a paragraph of text from wikipedia and stickied adsense there and found two sites with AS on the page with ONLY images, no external links or text whatsoever. Apart from the affiliate links the other sites aren't even selling anything, so there are no conversions. Also people click the affiliate ads just to find out it's the very same program, and again no conversions.

Smart pricing is hitting me hard, and I just found out why.

Check your ads people.

[Thez]

Needles to say, I reported both of the sites with AS and only images. The images weren't even linked to anything.

[danimal]

what i do is always screen new advertiser's url's... if there isn't a street address and telephone number, they go into the filter 90% of the time.

[makes a little sense]

Thez,

Unfortunately, this forum prevents me from posting blatant rule-breakers of AdSense, but I have one website I blocked which actually re-directs to another site. If you type in the root URL, it comes up a blank page. You need a "redirect php url" to make it go to the actual website it's coming from. It seems like they purposely did this to try and fool people like me who are blocking their ads.

[Thez]

You can still block it like any other ad, even though they have a redirect. Simply enter the URL or domain.

I've also seen a few of these.

[Scurramunga]

...I have one website I blocked which actually re-directs to another site. If you type in the root URL, it comes up a blank page. You need a "redirect php url" to make it go to the actual website it's coming from...

I have seen tons of these, they seem to be appearing more frequently.

[wewe]

I have seen a funny site (XXX.com), only a picture and three units of adsense, one of them is the ad of XXX.com, if you clike it, you'll be directed to XXX.com, then that ad display again, if you clike it, you'll be directed to XXX.com, then that ad display again, if you clike it, you'll be directed to XXX.com, then that ad display again, if you clike it, you'll be directed to XXX.com, then that ad display again, if you clike it, you'll be directed to XXX.com, then that ad display again......

OH,MY GOD!

[vanillaice]

I'm a bit of an adsense newbie, can you tell me how to check the ads? I'm scared of clicking on any because I hear google considers this fraud and will delete your account. I can go to teh display URL, but that isn't always the exact URL it's supposed to go to.

Is there a way to check your ads w/o being counted as a click?

[leadegroot]

Is there a way to check your ads w/o being counted as a click?

If you mouseover the ad the url will normally appear in the browser status bar (bottom line of the window)
Note that this is generally the homepage, not the landing page! But the domain name should match the landing page's domain

[Key_Master]

AdSense Preview Tool
[google.com...]

[vanillaice]

Thanks!

[Thez]

The only way to REALLY tell where the ad goes (the url shown on the ad and/or status bar can be set by the advertisers) is to right click the link, select copy address, paste it into your browser, and check the url=blablabla part from the address.

[sven1977]

Great post Thez,
I did the same thing right now, spent an hour on removing crap-ads from my site. It's really disgusting sometimes what you find there. Some of them had no links but Ads and others had just such crappy content and then of course AdSense all over the page with very little regular links out. Makes me think whether I should filter all pages with AdSense in general. Well, that's a different topic.

Anyway, I trashed about 10 sites through my filter.
I hope this was the reason why my EPC went to rock bottom the last couple of days.
I will report tomorrow if it changed anything earningwise.
But even if it doesn't, it's a good thing that these scumbags are gone from my pages.

[Nitrous]

You should!

[schmeg007]

I have a site with a great deal of content on a wide variety of topics. Because of this I rarely see the same advertiser on more than one page. With over 500 pages of content I don't think that checking advertisers manually would be worth my time.

Given that there is an adsense preview tool, does anyone know of an automated tool that will generate a list of advertiser URLs for a given publisher site? If not, I'm probably going to go write one now.