Questioning the "Unauthorized Sites" List

How are they gettting this info and how RELIABLE is it really?

[MikeNoLastName]

I've been doing some new links on my site lately and in the process noticed something odd about the Adsense generated "Unauthorized Sites" list. I've doubted some of the info provided there in the past, but had no firm data. According to their description "The following sites are not on your Allowed Sites list but have displayed ads using your AdSense publisher ID within the last week."

Now one of the sites which wound up on the list for this week is one which I am involved closely with and just started linking to from one page on my adsense sites in the past month. I can GUARANTEE there are no adsense links at ALL from it, let alone any using MY publisher ID. It appears to me that Adsense is occasionally getting confused about the source URL, perhaps by certain browser types, or specific conditions, and occasionally assigning unrelated URLS to a publisher which were previously or inter-session-wise visited by visitors. In this case it is simply an external link which pops up in a separate window.

Now in certain other threads about the topic of the Unauthorized Sites lists, other posters have conjectured that this list is used by Adsense to determine many things including the overall quality of the site, for smart-pricing, and whether they are possibly doing something against the policy worthy of banning on any of these domains. If this capability is so easily confused, then I think Adsense needs to rethink the validity of this input!

At least letting us have some input to it in the form of that screen is a good first step. I feel my smart-pricing started improving immediately after using it, Although it also makes me wonder how much LEGITIMATE revenue I'm losing simply because G THINKS it came from an unauthorized URL? So perhaps they need to let us have more input to other aspects of smart-pricing.

[edited by: MikeNoLastName at 1:41 am (utc) on Jan. 29, 2008]

[jomaxx]

Occasionally when I take a close look at referrers in my logs, I see cases where browsers have gotten "confused" and are providing obviously incorrect information.

BTW, I am NOT referring to cases of referrer spam. These are legit cases where perhaps the user hit the back arrow and the previous page was treated as a referrer, perhaps the surfer clicked a second link before the first link opened, something like that.

So, I believe that this could happen with AdSense and I suppose there's not much they could do about it. However, if this really is the problem, I'd estimate the frequency of this happening at about one in 10,000 or so. Not enough to worry about; it's just that if you have enough unique visitors, you'll see everything happen sooner or later.

[MikeNoLastName]

Agreed, however if G is using even a single detected occurance ("if we caught it THIS time, how many did we miss?") as an indication for an AUTOMATIC algorithm, that someone is linking Adsense from or is otherwise intentionally associated with a "bad neighborhood" (i.e. someone associated with that domain is legitimately clicking on my links) then bad things could ultimately result.