Adsense attack?

Someone publishes Ads with my publisher id on a crappy website

[fdmaster]

Hi fellow webmasters,

Just want to know what you think about such an attack.

I run a search engine and we of course serve AdSense ads. It is quite popular website so we are close to become Fedex/UPS club members.

Today it came to my attention that some website steals our content (search results) and publishes it on a really low quality website with popups/dialers, loads of MS ODBC errors on every page. You got the idea. What worse is that they basically simply embed most of my HTML code in their page together with AdSense code with my publisher ID, and some links back to my website.

The scary part obviously that G sooner or later takes a look at it and tells us bye bye... due to a number of the policy violations on pages with ads with our pblisher ID.

So far I've sent to G email explaining situation, stating that I have nothing to do with that idiot (or smart attacker) and giving them complete list of domain which I publish ads on.

Has someone been in such a position already? Any suggestions?

[ve3cnu]

I would hope that Google is thinking about this and many other scenarios. This is what you have to expect when you open up such a program to the masses. I expect at some point we (legit adsense members) will have to submit a form at Google for each site we run ads on, and then have it verified somehow.

[PatrickDeese]

I would file a DMCA complaint with Google, also file one with his hosting company as well as the domain name registrar.

The sooner it is offline, the better, IMHO.

[bobothecat]

"Today it came to my attention that some website steals our content (search results) and publishes it on a really low quality website with popups/dialers, loads of MS ODBC errors on every page. You got the idea. What worse is that they basically simply embed most of my HTML code in their page together with AdSense code with my publisher ID, and some links back to my website."

File a DMCA as Patrick said... this should get the ball rolling in your favor. If this doesn't work, then you may want to consider taking some time to chat with counsel. DMCA complaints do seem to work quite well when filed against/with the hosting company... especially since Google's so slow in responding to DMCA's ( from past experience anyhow ).

[iProgram]

The problem is how can you find that someone is using your publisher id.

[reloguy]

Wouldn't it be fairly easy for Google to add something to the Adsense reporting to show the domains/IP addresses from which the clicks in our accounts originated? We could just look at the report and say, "Hey that's not my site!"

[Jenstar]

DMCA

[google.com...] You can also file one with the host to have it removed.

rogerd also has a great post about what to do when your content has been stolen:
[webmasterworld.com...]

The problem is how can you find that someone is using your publisher id.

This can't be done that I am aware of.

[reloguy]

This can't be done that I am aware of.

Google must know the referrer when the [pagead2.googlesyndication.com...] URL is requested.

They could easily log the referrers and the publisher ID and then display the referring domains to the owner of that publisher ID.

[fdmaster]

Thank you for the suggestions. I certanly will get the DMCA ball rolling once I hear google's response on this one.

However, the isssue with copyright infrigement is not the main issue here. It can be relatively easy delt with. Also in this case it appears that they make live requests to my site everytime someone executes a search on their site. Therefore, it most likely can be tracked and sorted by technical means.

The main problem is that they've got my adsense ads there with my adsense publisher id and also with links back to my sites. So it looks like it is my website and at some point G could simply teminate my account for policy violation done by a website which has got my adsense ads even if I had nothing to do with it.

If I just sort it by technical methods it is still a possibility that next month G could still terminate my account because of policy violations.

[Jenstar]

Google must know the referrer

Google knows all publisher IDs and all the URLs where they appear. But I meant that Joe Public can't go and plug in a publisher ID into a search engine and magically come up with a list of all the URLs that publisher's ID appears on.