Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My fist question has probably been answered before, so bear with me.
Does Google know the difference if I click on an ad on my site on my home computer or here at work? I know never to click on my ads and I do most of my work on my home computer, where my files are located. Today I was messing around here at work on my break, cutting and pasting a link block into a spreadsheet. I was playing with the design of my pages. When I removed the link block, the first couple of tries ended up with clicking on the first link and going to the Google ads. (Hope this makes sense.)
Is Google going to know that was me clicking and will I have a problem becuase I clicked my own ads? I probably did it three or four times before I remembered the rules about clicking.
Thanks for any help.
lets see more members coment ^~
AdSense identifies each user by:
- IP Address (most important)
- Cookie
- Google Toolbar
- Operating System
- Screen Resolution
- Web Browser
Thank you for the comments.
I plan to become an active part of this group and hopefully will have something I can share. I can tell you that I now know all the things NOT to do to create a website that generates a good income! I learned all that before I started reading these posts.
> AdSense identifies each user by:
> - IP Address (most important)
Can't be faked, precisely speaking, but of course it also cannot usually be used to easily identify a particular computer. Most IP addresses that AdSense sees are not going to be the IP address of the computer that the person who did the clicking was using. They're going to be the address of some intermediate box that was providing Network Address Translation.
> - Cookie
> - Google Toolbar
> - Operating System
> - Screen Resolution
> - Web Browser
All trivial for any script kiddie to fake.
Of course, Google is not a court of law with rules of evidence. They're free to penalize you for an action they can't entirely prove you took.
Is Google going to know that was me clicking and will I have a problem becuase I clicked my own ads? I probably did it three or four times before I remembered the rules about clicking.
Yes, of course they will. Don't you remember they inserted an electronic tagging device when you joined? Just in case you have forgotten, they also wiped your memory of the event. But that wears off after a couple of years :)
Seriously I don't think they can tell it was you from your work computer. But they are looking for all sorts of patterns so best plan is to avoid clicking your own ads anywhere, any time. That way you can sleep at nights.
I plan to become an active part of this group and hopefully will have something I can share. I can tell you that I now know all the things NOT to do to create a website that generates a good income! I learned all that before I started reading these posts.
And welcome to WW! How NOT to do it experiences are as valuable (if not more so) as success tips, so I'm sure your contributions will be valuable and make good discussion points.
"I've had ads on my site for years now"
"I probably did it three or four times before I remembered the rules about clicking."
If you have ads on your site for years now, and if you are so much of a professional that you are making a serious income with it, how on earth could there be any second in your existence when you forgot the rules about clicking your own ads?
I am really not out to catch you here, I just donīt understand the logic of not remembering the rules of clicking when you are doing ads for year now.
Again, apologies if I just misread your post...
I started my web site with the idea of making a living so I could stop working for someone else 10 years ago. My site is a hand built directory. That means every bit of information on my site came from hours of surfing the internet (just ask my husband). If you were to look at my site, you would know that becuase I would call it a "retro" site. Retro meaning I don't know a thing about automation and it looks like a site from 10 years ago. It is very time consuming (one of the things I would do differently).
Through the years I have tried different ways to make income from this site. Some ideas brought in a trickle, others brought nothing. I added AdSense links several years ago (I could tell you exactly when if Google AdSense wasn't down). I made my first $100 check my second month. But, I didn't know there was a way to make these ads work better until I found this forum.
So, after reading the forum I started playing with things. The HUGE change came when I changed my ads to incorporate them into my text. I went from several hundred dollars per month to sever thousand.
That really got me exited and got me thinking about experimenting over the last month. I work on my website in the evenings and on my lunch hours at work. I have it engrained into my brain at home to NEVER click on a link. I also never click on a link from the office. But, I was doing some cutting and pasting into a word document to do some different layouts on my lunch hour the other day and in the process, ended up clicking on ads. (Easy to do when cutting and pasting.)After the third or fourth time, it hit me that I was breaking the Google rules. I freaked! Thus my first post ever to this group, hoping for advice on what I should do. Thank you to those who so kindly responded.
I'm sure that many of you think I am trying to see if I can pull off something by clicking on my ads at work and Google won't know. You are surely entitled to that belief.
All I wanted was to know if I should contact Google and tell them why I had done what I did. I corresponded twice with Google support and they were very understanding.
Now, I'm going to move on and continue to build my site!
I think of myself more as a middle aged lady who has a dream and is finally seeing it start to happen!
If I could be more professional, I'd probably have succeeded at this years ago.
Sometimes being a "professional" is overrated, in that sense. A gifted persistent non-"professional" may end up doing a better job for less money and remain a human at the end of the process!
Welcome to WW!
Rgds
Damon
Oh how I hope you are right!
Last night I was trying to understand all this business about Smart Pricing. I have hundreds of pages, some make nothing, others make a few dollars a month. I was thinking about what I needed to do to figure out what pages needed what changes.
Finally I decided that I've made it this far on just providing what people love about my site and that is what I should be doing and not worrying about maximizing every detail.
I know that maximizing is probably a smarter way to go for a business, but I have to do what I love and let things happen as they will.
That doesn't mean I will quit learning from this group, it just means that I will not make myself crazy any longer trying to figure it all out.
What works for me is adding new pages, building my newsletter list and keeping up with the basics. There are only so many hours in the day.
A little a day of what I enjoy has been my plan since 1997 for my main site too!
Keep at it!
Rgds
Damon
"I think of myself more as a middle aged lady who has a dream and is finally seeing it start to happen!"
May your dreams become reality!
Stick around, because anything you need to know about Adsense is right here in this forum, for free!
Who knows, we might learn a thing or 2 from you;-)
I absolutely understand your post. It's really hard to convey what we are trying to say sometimes in forums, that's why I don't do it very often :-)
I know I will continue to learn from all of you and I will see if I can contribute anything that will help someone.
I've started to mentor a couple of friends who know nothing about making an income from the internet. It has made me realize that I do know more than I think I do.
Oregon
