An Overlooked problem. Allowed sites issue

Could proxys really be a bad thing?

[solidcore]

Concept:

You run a web-site and everyone at school/college visits your site daily... but school blocks your site.

What does your visitor do? They use a proxy site.

If they use a proxy site and you've only allowed ads to be displayed on your domain, then the proxy site ripping your content onto their domain will block your adsense, however displaying won't make you a penny.

So my point here is, if a 1000 visitors a day came to your site at a proxy site, and clicked your ads, if you enable "allow your domain.com" only to pay for your ads, then you're 1000 visitors who use your site on a proxy at a school/college around the globel won't be earning you anything!

Major issue that needs to be thought out...

And my opinion, theres no way to fix this problem except allow your ads to be displayed elsewhere!

[jomaxx]

You're not factually wrong, but if you have 1,000 people a day coming to your website via proxy sites, you're probably banned already. The average site would expect only a minuscule proportion of visitors to be using proxies.

Also, Google apparently shows you what non-approved sites have been showing your ads, so you're free to add such sites to the list if you wish.

[Hobbs]

if you have 1,000 people a day coming to your website via proxy sites, you're probably banned already

jomaxx, There are tens of countries that access the web via proxy, you think those millions of visitors can get a publisher banned?

Google does know how to sort out visitors behind proxies, there is no banning problem there, they don't even show in the allowed sites list.

[edited by: Hobbs at 1:51 am (utc) on Oct. 4, 2007]

[jomaxx]

This is different from that kind of proxy. The situation being described is maybe not necessarily bannable, but highly bizarre.

[solidcore]

The situation is:

- A proxy site is an interface that takes a URL of your desire , retrieves the data and puts it onto their domain.

some_proxy_domain.com/view_page=example.com

So the content contains

"Example.com with adsense msn's adsense on the pages"

Now if some proxy domain is the Host of the content, and the adsense is on that domain, (straight-copy) then if you only allowed Example.com to server adsense ads with your Publisher ID, the ads that were Straight-copyed dynamicly won't pay you any money on the some proxy domain.

The problem is people use Some Proxy Domain to retrieve your pages when the URL is banned from Schools/Universities accross the globe (they are incojunction with each another using the same applications supplied to that school/university to keep their pupils from browsing myspace/porn/youtube etc)

So if you're site is one of the banned, your visits view your ads on a another domain and your ads wont pay and be blocked by googles Allowed site feature.

What happens to your "daily income" it drops becuase you've blocked such a site posing as your own.

Any solutions? I doubt it, a big loss of money, and you could argue that the site was blocked anway so the loss was there, but the visitor finds a way around this, and therefor your site/content is being "used" without any "adsense value".

IRONY: google actualy allows proxy sites to serve their own adsense on their own homepages.

[jomaxx]

Any solutions? I doubt it

I already gave you a solution. Google tells you what un-approved sites have been showing your code. Just add those sites to your list. Another solution: Don't enable the "allowed sites" feature at all.

Is this an actual problem for you, or are you just trying to come up with some hypothetical complaint to moan about?

[tim222]

This issue doesn't seem to be any different than sites that display your site in a frame. One example is Google Images.

I tried Allowed Sites and it seemed to be more of a pain than it was worth. However if I had a problem with rogue sites using my ID, that would be a different story.

[jomaxx]

No, simple framing of a site is a totally separate issue.

[solidcore]

jomaxx, do i really want the traffic on proxy sites using my ID.. if a banned adsense ID appears on the same site, won't google confuse them both?

[jomaxx]

Probably not, but that is a valid concern, which is why I personally wouldn't explicitly add a proxy site to my list of valid domains.

Leaving the "allowed sites" functionality disabled should be just fine for most people, but assuming you really are describing your own situation, I can see 2 problems on the horizon:

1. It seems like there must be something dodgy about your site if it's being explicitly banned by the school. Borderline content, file sharing, something dodgy.

2. School kids, even college kids, are not a particularly desirable demographic. They tend to be poor and to spend a vast amount of time online compared with the amount of $$ they spend. Yes it's unfair in some sense, but if you expect advertisers to pay you cash money for every click you send, then you have to realize that it can only work if advertisers have a decent shot at making a profit.

[solidcore]

Myspace & Youtube banned at schools so I don't know, maybe its just "certain content" schools don't apprecaite as they have no level of filter on what is possible to appear, despite the fact that my own site is 100% porn free and contains no adult material.