Avoiding invalid (own) clicks

Just an idea

[joempie]

I just had a friend visiting who used my computer and
I was shocked to see him click on one of the adsense
banners on my website. I don't know if I should
report this to Google or will they filter it out automatically?

Anyway, I want to avoid any stuff like this
in the future, so I made 100% sure it wont happen again. Maybe this is an idea for other webmasters
as well: Just add a line to your local host file
(in xp, this is under
C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS)
saying:

127.0.0.1pagead2.googlesyndication.com

Or use the IP number of some other server that
will produce an error...

OK, this also means that you don't even see the ads on
your own site anymore, but at least it also assures
that you (or your kids) will not accidentily click
anymore :-) It would be even better if Google would
use 2 different servers for adserving and for clicking.
Then we could still see the banners but not click.

If anyone has better tricks, please let me know.

Cheers,
Joempie

[Brett_Tabke]

One click is no mind - you should do it every-so-often to make sure it is still working and that you aren't being embarassed by external content inappropriate for your site.

Ya, every one can add that to their hosts file ;-) Stops all those ads cold. Never worry again. lol

funny stuff joempie!

[Jenstar]

Someone reporting previously that he told AdSense his IP address (I believe everyone in his company used the same IP network address) and to block all clicks coming from his IP, and they said they would. It is worth a try for the truly paranoid ;)

Personally, I wouldn't want to do anything so that I would not be able to see AdSense ads, because then you wouldn't be able to tell whether there is a targeting issue, PSA issue, or even a non-served ad issue.

[Nikke]

Sounds like shooting mosquitos with bazookas to me, but I have also done som strange things to avoid seeing AdSense on my sites:

Some time ago, I had was annoyed that the mediabot showed up too soon when I published new pages on my site. I use a content management system that lets me see the page live on the site even though it isn't yet linked from any pages. The cookie expiration time is only 20 minutes in the CMS, so in order not to time out in the mid work, I usually save/publish unfinished stuff.

But since the AdSense code (at that time) was so fast in visiting, it would target everything but the main text on the page (since it wasn't there yet).

I then entered some code to never show the AdSense code when logged in to the publishing system. This slowed the mediabot down, and gave me more accurate ads. The side effect was that I almost never saw any AdSense ads on that site, since I almost never visited without being logged in.