How to prevent someone from running my AdSense Ads?

And lowering my EPC

[angsuman]

I have recently noticed (1 week) that my page impressions are artifically increasing (not the clicks). They are not being generated from any of my sites. I don't know where they are coming from. Copyscape/Google etc. doesn't show any pages (may not have been indexed yet).

It is drastically lowering my price per clicks.

I wrote a nice email to Google to help me identifying the source as it is obviously in their database; haven't heard back from them yet.

Can you suggest some way to find out and prevent others from creating false impression on my adsense ads (and presumably stealing the content too).

Thanks.

PS. Could Google Web Accelerator be responsible?

[Hobbs]

You cannot "stop" anyone from copying your pages to their own PC, you can only give them hard time.
You can use cgi or java tracking within your pages, then it would be a matter of identifying which IPs are calling your tracking code in your logs, and block those IPs from accessing your site if they come back to copy more pages.
Its good you have documented the case by contacting Google in case things turn nasty, but don't worry, if somone intended to harm you, you would have seen many clicks not just impressions.

[angsuman]

What bothers me is that these extra impressions are lowering my CTR and Google's Smart(?) Price is kicking in and significantly reducing the revenue.

I have checked my recent logs without any leads. Possible the copying was done sometime back.

It looks like Google's Smart pricing can be easily tricked by anyone to penalize competitors. It isn't reasonable.

[ann]

How do you know that they are artificial? You see them in your logs they have visited your site.

Have you signed up for some free traffic or exchanged links with non relevant sites lately?

It appears you are simply getting low value traffic that is not interested in your content or the ads related to your subject.

Relax, it looks like a case of bad links to you and that should not hurt you in the serps unless you are linking back to them.

Smart pricing should not even be involved in it since you say clicks have not gone up. IF they have gone up and not converting then smart pricing might play a role in all of this.

Looks like just a case of bad traffic.

Ann

[endomorph1]

I too am concerned with this matter. Is it ok to save the Adsense code to a .js file and then call the file with -

<script language="JavaScript" src="myscript.js"></script>

I assume it would be as you are not changing the adsense code directly, just the way it is being pulled into the page.

[ann]

It could also be a case of someone framing your site, ask jeeves does this I know, so a frame busting code would be an excellent addition to the page headers throughout your site.

<script language="JavaScript1.1"
type="text/javascript"><!-- // hide from old browsers
if (parent.frames.length > 0) top.location.replace(document.location); // Escape from any referring site's frame, but preserve one-click "Back". -->
</script>

[ann]

endmorph,

You can use server side includes to call the ads.

[centix]

google cached pages?!

[endomorph1]

pragma no-cache?

[angsuman]

@ann,

> How do you know that they are artificial? You see them in your logs they have visited your site.

Good question. I am getting page impressions only in Google.

However they are not reflected in Sitemeter, for example.

Also if I select the url channels which covers all my domains then I do not see these extra page impressions.

It is as if these impressions are coming from a phantom site.

> Have you signed up for some free traffic or exchanged links with non relevant sites lately?

No, not in thousand years! I haven't got crazy last I checked :)

> so a frame busting code would be an excellent addition to the page headers throughout your site.

Thanks for your suggestions. I do however already have framebuster code in there for quite sometime.

I don't think such a sudden jump can be caused by Google cache. Why would suddenly so many people be interested in viewing my site from cache? Also even if they did then I would see some of their activity in my referer logs as the images are loaded. No luck there either!

[pompousjohn]

This has been happening to me too, and I was concerned about it but was told the source was probably cached pages.

Its been several weeks now though and the phantom impressions seem to be increasing. I would seem to me that cached impressions would fade over time.

My overall numbers are so low that i don't think this is affecting anything, but still it bothers me not knowing what is going on.

[Frequent]

I wouldn't think your cached pages would see a sudden surge in traffic causing this problem.

My guess is that someone scraped an entire page or pages from your site including your adsense code.

I would start going page by page through your site and pull entire unique sentences to use as search terms. If you have many pages it could be a long process but it should eventually turn up the theives.

Also, I don't know if you are using relative urls for images etc. but if you switch some over to a full path it could allow you to find people that ripped your pages in the future since they will be calling the images from your server. This, of course, assumes they are too lazy to check such things which they must be or they would have swapped your adsense code with their own.

Freq---