New from AdSense: Allowed Site Feature

Tell Google Which Sites are Allowed to Use Your AdSense Code

[iwannano1]

First, let me say 'thank you' for adding nice feature that identify the domains that are allowed to display Google ads for my account. A few suggestions:

a) if ad spotted on a different domain an email alert should be sent to adsense login email id. So that further action be taken from my side. This is also useful if I forget to whitelist my own new domain name.

b) Please fix help link url [google.com...]

[panos]

Are we sure that this new feature is working properly?

There is only one site in my "allowed sites list" added 2 weeks ago. Starting from yesterday one of my channels is showing a 75% increase in impressions, the clicks are showing normal type figures.

Yesterday i've disabled Adsense on my site but this particular channel - today - is still showing thousands of impressions and one click ...

I have contacted Adsense support concerning this issue and i'm waiting for their reply.

Panos

[MikeNoLastName]

"Ideally, I'd like to see Google itself at least publishing this list if not allowing these sites by default, but if anyone has a handy list, it would save each of us from reinventing the wheel each time. "

Why should they? If you notice, their solution is not to DISABLE the ads on these sites, as I would think they would, but rather to show them (so they can still be clicked on) and NOT pay YOU for them. I don't recall seeing it say anything about not charging the advertiser or collecting your share for themselves! The more you miss, the more they put in their own pocket.

[Juan_G]

About that point, they say:

If a URL displaying your AdSense ad code is not on your Allowed Sites list, ads will still be displayed, but impressions and clicks won't be recorded, advertisers won't be charged, and you won't receive any earnings for that URL.

AdSense Help: What is my Allowed Sites list? [google.com]

I'm testing this new feature, and it seems to be working correctly now, with similar earnings.

And, according to other tracking, Google's caches, translations and similar are a very small percentage of traffic in my case (quite less than 1%). Maybe for others is different, I don't know.

[edited by: Juan_G at 10:25 am (utc) on Oct. 15, 2007]

[panos]

Still seeing tens of thousands of impressions (and some clicks) after i pulled adsense off my site (the only one in the allowed sites list) 2 days ago.

[walrus]

The more you miss, the more they put in their own pocket.

I've always trusted Google was pretty fair based on last 3 years performance but i am starting to wonder too.
I have seen so many posts about Adwords minimum bids rising or advertisers having to pay more but this month i am experiencing the lowest cpm of all time, exactly half last October with almost same impressions and no big changes to the pages.

[berto]

Several months ago, I had a day where my page impressions count spiked upward by literally two orders of magnitude (i.e., by about 100X). A week later, I had another day where the page impressions count jumped upward by about 20X. Thereafter, most days had page impression counts "only" 2X to 5X my normal historical numbers. My webserver logs were showing normal site visitor and hit numbers. Very occasionally I would get some stray clicks I could not attribute to any of my sites, but only occasionally.

I wondered why until I activated my account's Allowed Site feature.

Unbelievably, Big Company X's alpha development website was using my publisher ad client ID!

An e-mail to Big Company X's customer support (also to Google) cleared up the problem, and Big Company X's URLs are gradually disappearing from my unauthorized sites list.

Now my page impressions counts are falling back to normal levels.

Alas, throughout this episode, my CTRs didn't keep pace with the traffic surges, so for the past couple of months my CTRs have been abysmal. (That is, I observed normal CTR for the pages served from my sites, and an an implied near-zero CTR from Big Company X's served alpha, development pages.) If CTR enters into the EPC and publisher pricing formula (lower CTR => lower EPC--a much disputed idea on this forum, but anyway...)--if the artifically low CTR has lowered my EPC over the past couple of months, I've been screwed.

Morever, with the inflated page impression counts of the last several months, my split tests and other statistics have been shot to h***. So much for my long-term trends analysis.

Oh well, C'est la vie!

Moral of the Story: If you haven't activated your site's Allowed Sites list, you should probably do so. You might be in for a shock.

[MikeNoLastName]

Berto,
I think we may have had a similar experience, and it HAS hurt us over the last 6 moths! We recently activated the allowed sites feature and our CPM has climbed steadlily by almost 60% after dropping far more than that since March. Other things HAVE happened and changed as well, so I can't really attribute it solely to this. We similarly had some unusual clickthru activity back in March, of which we notified G and after which our PPC and thus CPM declined steadily.
The question is: You think it has to do with long-term lower CTR, while I'm wondering if it is something a little more advanced? We know G uses "trustworthiness" and cross-linking into bad neighborhoods, to determine whether to penalize sites on page ranking, what if they are also using the fact that your publisher ID is appearing on "less trustworthy" sites as a factor in smart-pricing? For instance others have suggested that smart-pricing is based on account-wide factors, so, if someone else uses your ID even once, their, possibly much lower, smart-pricing coefficient is being averaged in with yours, thus dragging yours down with it. If this is even remotely possible then this should be an absolutely ESSENTIAL feature for everyone.
Since we set it up, in addition to the aforementioned "trusted" search engines that others are reporting, we have been averaging at least another 20 different slimy sites each week supposedly using our code. When I go to look at them I can't see how in the heck they could be doing it? I can easily see how it could be happening on G due to cached pages, (we also have a whole lot of them from google images? How does that happen?) but none of these slime sites seem like they copy anyone's pages let alone ours or even use Adsene anywhere on their own! Most of them are Arbitrage or "search" engines. Could all these simply be page detection mistakes by Adsense penalizing us all along? Could it be due to someone's browser not reporting the proper URL, or maybe someone clicking to an MFA arbitrage site and then clicking right back to our site?

[edited by: MikeNoLastName at 2:53 am (utc) on Oct. 22, 2007]

[panos]

Just an update:

Google is still counting impressions and clicks from not allowed sites. CPM down 50%

[berto]

MikeNoLastName:

It's plausible that slimy sites (or even competitors?) could employ your publisher ID to malign your site.

In my case, I have no reason to believe that Big Company X is either (a) slimy or (b) out to "get me".

It appears to be an honest mistake, but how did Big Company X, and its website developer, Small Company Y, happen to use my publisher ID? Did they perhaps use a random number generator for their test publisher ID?

Incidentally, a week after Big Company X removed my publisher ID from their test pages Adsense ads, Small Company Y (the website developer) is still serving test pages with Adsense ads using my publisher ID. I infer this because Small Company Y's URLs are still appearing in my Unauthorized Sites list. (I have sent follow-up e-mail to Small Company Y asking them to cease and desist.)

Grumble, grumble...

[MikeNoLastName]

Yeah, I wouldn't consider any of the sites showing up as competitors or out to get us either, as far as I know. I'll have to check the logs to see if I can detect if they are sending us traffic via our paid ads on other PPC ad services we subscribe to. The general lack of info from Adsense (URL, # of impressions, date) makes that like finding a needle in a haystack though. I'm thinking it is more of an adsense/browser bug though, reporting a prior URL instead of the current (ours) page, so we're potentially losing valid impressions/clicks as we debug their software. Heck, we're still getting impressions (about 15-20 day) reporting for a channel we took off the page weeks ago.

[walrus]

we're still getting impressions (about 15-20 day) reporting for a channel we took off the page weeks ago

That is a serious lag, obviously there are a few problems right now,
Site diagnostics was showing ask.com as a blocked url, it should only be reporting my urls. Ive seen this before, little glitch i guess but yesterday I saw 15 out of 20 search results were .cn again so i think G is just bogged down right now with tech difficulties and they are probably scrambling to rectify it all.