Can Adsense See the Origin of Your Incoming Traffic?

[bigdealioo]

1) In other words, does the Adsense javascript track from what Referrers visitors (and possibly other traffic information) come to your page displaying Adsense ads?

2) Is it against the TOS to make an effort to conceal the origin of the traffic? What I mean is.. putting every in-bound link thru a local referrer switch/re-direct, so the only referrers Google would see - would be something like yoursite.com/trafficmgmt.php?as=348&sdj=uuihA&8 ?

3) Did anyone get in trouble for doing what's described in #2?

P.S. To prevent overzealous replies (like "o but why would u wanna do this to good ol G?"), let me state the following right away:

We know that G is very secretive about many things (when secrecy benefits their business model) - so I believe I have my right to not disclose certain proprietary business information to G either.

[MThiessen]

I think he's just trolling. If he does this he will be committing adsense suicide, I don't believe for one second he is actually going to do it.

[frox]

Yes, google knows your referrers.

A long ago, Mr anchovy set up a $100 challenge here to do that through pure javascript.

[webmasterworld.com...]

In the following pages of that discussion, I showed it could be done and won the $100.

To a larger extent, traffic laundering like yours is dangerous and useless.

1) Dangerous, because the main mechanism for click fraud detection is detecting suspect statistical patterns in your traffic, and having a large portion of your traffic without referrers is very suspect.

A smart guy I knew set up a clever way to launder his traffic from a previously banned domain.

What he did was (I thought at the moment) really clever...

www.banned.ext is the banned domain
www.clean.ext is the clean domain

set up a Search page on www.clean.ext

www.clean.ext/search.php

when you click "Search", you go to www.clean.ext/searchresults.php

this page lists the pages of www.clean.ext that match your search.

So, his traffic redirection was:

1) www.banned.ext/widget.php redirects to www.clean.ext/search.php
2) www.clean.ext/search.php redirects to www.clean.ext/searchresults.php?keyword=widget
3) www.clean.ext/searchresults.php?keyword=widget redirects to www.clean.ext/widget.php, the only page that contains Adsense.

His reasoning was: "Adsesne will be fooled into believing these guys are organic traffic on my site, searching for "widget".

so he was smart enough not only to conceal the original referrer, but also to build a fake but real-looking referrer.

He wasn't smart enough, and got banned. see point 2 below

2) Useless
What is the percentage of users that have the google toolbar installed? Say it's 1% (just an example, any number will work anyway)....

If a user has google toolbar, google sees all his steps in navigation, regardless of the referrers.

So, in the example above, Google has the following hypotethical data:

1) Visitors of www.clean.ext/widget.php : 10.000
2) Of these visitors, only 100 (1%) had google toolbar
3) Of these 100 visitors, I can see (through toolbar data) that 95% previously were on www.banned.ext/widget.php
4) I can therefore infer that 95% of your taffic is redirected from www.banned.ext, so of your 10.000 visitors about 9.500 are re-directed from www.banned.ext

Can you see why he got the "Banned for connection with a previously banned account" email?

The same holds for any source of "non-kosher" traffic.... google can see (a portion of) your users passing there before coming to your site!

Google is building a network of traffic checkpoints (places where thay can collect traffic information), and does it to protect their main asset: PPC.

Can you now understand why google bought Urchin for $30 Milion and then started giving away the service for free, as Google analytics? That's like having millions on checkpoints for visitors.. everytime you pass on a site with Gooogle Analytics, you are recognisable.

Can you now understand why they are se heavily promoting the google toolbar (paying referrals for a free product!), adding products and services to it?

Take for an example the brand new Google Web History:
[google.com...]

Read the third point:
Follow interesting trends in your web activity.

Does that sound familiar? Why do you think they are developing software to analize "trends in your web activity?"

Believe me, you won't be able to out-smart google.

To sum it up:

does the Adsense javascript track from what Referrers visitors (and possibly other traffic information) come to your page displaying Adsense ads?

YES

2) Is it against the TOS to make an effort to conceal the origin of the traffic?

NO
But it's suspect, useless and dangerous

3) Did anyone get in trouble for doing what's described in #2?

YES

[Marcia]

This is contextual advertising, and knowing where referrals come from is part of assessing context for targeting ads. They're entitled to the relevant information - that's how contextual advertising works.

Any attempt at obfuscating and/or disabling a mechanism that can be used by them in detecting fraud, which is a rampant problem and costs millions and hurts everyone, has got to be suspect. The information is necessary to have, and if anyone wants to withhold it, that's their prerogative - it's very easy. Just don't participate in a contextual program, run banners that pay per action. Problem solved.

[iwannano1]

What is the point of this topic?
Noon

Google has many ways to get information about your traffic. Google # 1, search engine, they log all queries before sending user to your site. Almost all site out there use Google free web stat program called analytics.

If I were you I will not focus on this issue.

[bigdealioo]

Thanks to all replies, especially to frox. I more or less, get the picture now.

P.S. Frox.. in my situation there WOULD be referrers but all referrers will look like mysite.com/traffic.php?param1=2289as&param2=whatever8933

[youfoundjake]

Bigdealioo,
I say go ahead and set it up. Let us know how it works and the end result. The worst that could be done is that you get banned, and lose a month of income. The best that could happen is that it works the way you hope. Either way, you will have what you want, although not directly what you were expecting. You will either have your data kept internally, while staying a publisher, or be banned, and having your data still kept internally.