Not showing adsense to msnbot etc

I guess it's cloaking, but..

[astro_miner]

I'm filtering who gets to see ads based on IP ranges, referers and user agents, showing no ads to msnbot, slurp and any other spiders, and also not showing ads to traffic that I'd rather get a link back from. The exceptions are googlebot and mediapartners, on the obscure chance that they may need it for proper showing of ads or statistics.

Maybe most spider traffic doesn't get counted anyway since they don't execute javascript?

Is this frowned upon by google (cloaking)? It's not to rank better but to reduce useless impressions and get links.

[perldiver]

It is my understanding also that bots don't make Adsense page impressions because bots don't execute javascript. Can anyone confirm?

[Sanenet]

Surely any decent bot would take into account adsense ads (and any other ads which have a clearly recognisable url) and ignore them.

In any case, Adsense would recognise and ignore any clicks from those bots.

[perldiver]

It would still be good to get an official word on this...

[jomaxx]

Conventional spiders do not execute the Javascript that would generate impressions or clicks.

What makes it akin to cloaking is that the AdSense code will be shown to some IPs and not others. This is a fairly common form of ad serving and will not affect the indexable text on the page; therefore I doubt any SE would be concerned about it.

(You should be sure to show the code to Google, though, the bots and also the Googleplex in Mountain View. I can imagine what they'd think if you repeatedly generate impressions and clicks on a page that doesn't appear to have AdSense code on it at all.)

[edited by: jomaxx at 5:22 pm (utc) on Nov. 10, 2005]

[Sanenet]

The "official" word is that you don't cloak, and you show the same page to everybody.

[google.com ] (at the bottom)

They are confident that they can weed out any clicks from bots, so I doubt they'd be too happy with your explanation of why you're cloaking!

[astro_miner]

I'm just not going to show the ads to traffic sources that give a 0.001% ctr. Better for them and better for me. Might get some extra links out of it too.

Also, it's basically the same as people rotating adsense and YPN, which is allowed. I'm merely rotating adsense and nothing.

Maybe I should show an ad for one of my other sites instead of no ads at all.

I guess I would be interested to hear what google thinks of this, though I see no real problem with it. They get higher quality traffic.