AdSense Ads that can't be blocked

What is with all these garbage ads?

[Burningcoals]

I am so frustrated with Adsense right now. I have a single domain on which I generate quality content for a niche audience. It's a respectable site but since Christmas, the quality of ads being served on my site are abysmal. Numerous ads for Asian/Russian "dating" services which look more like escort services, ads with sexual connotations, ads promoting fake credit card numbers, ads for video games that promote the player being a "drug lord". Just garbage and none of it relevent to my site content at all.

The worst ad I cannot seem to block because there is no URL at the bottom left corner and the Adsense Preview Tool does not show it. When a reader complained and sent me the URL, I blocked it via the competitive ad filter almost 2 weeks ago. It keeps showing up. It also appears to have a multiple layer of URLs that I have no idea how to figure out what they are without violating the Adsense TOS. I am in this Catch-22 of having a skanky ad that offends my readers and no way of removing it without risking getting my account yanked. I emailed [e-mail] for help but so far have not heard from them.

[tim222]

Right click on the ad and select "Copy Shortcut"

Paste into a text editor such as Notepad.

The URL of the ad is near "adurl="

[google.com...]

[Burningcoals]

Thank you. That would have worked under normal ad circumstances but when the ad in question is right clicked, it yields the following:

Zoom In
Zoom Out
Show All
__________
Quality
__________
Play
Loop
__________
Rewind
Forward
Back
________
Settings
___________
Print
About Adobe Flash Player 9

Google Preview Tool does not show the ad, right clicking on it doesn't work so what I am supposed to do to get this skanky ad off my site?

[Burningcoals]

And nothing from Google Adsense support either.

[Scurramunga]

Why not opt out of everything except text only ads. That's what I have done.

BTW, I saw a stupid "press the fart button ad" on another site the other day.

[loudspeaker]

I also have issues with Flash ads. There seems to be no way of identifying or blocking them (short of changing to the "text only" format)

[iridiax]

Why not opt out of everything except text only ads. That's what I have done.

I agree. Many of the flash ads I see on other sites are either poorly targeted or completely untargeted dreck. Flash ads are also slow to load and can be quite annoying, especially the ones that blink, flash, loop repeatedly, have embedded sound, or expand to cover the page if your cursor accidentally wanders over them.

[Tropical Island]

I dumped everything other than text ads right from the beginning.

To me flash & video ads are super annoying.

[celgins]

I also have issues with Flash ads. There seems to be no way of identifying or blocking them (short of changing to the "text only" format)

You may have better luck tackling Flash ads by using Firefox. You can easily locate the URL for the video in Firefox, but not in IE.

I had this problem several months ago and asked Google about it. They confirmed that the URL wasn't visible in IE (via the Preview Tool, or IE's copy-shortcut feature), and that they would "look into it."

1. In Firefox, go to: Page Info > Media -- then locate the media data associated with the flash video ad.

2. You will need to scroll to the end of the URL to find the domain name you wish to filter.

Also -- if you are being site-targeted by these annoying ads, you will soon be able to filter or block specific advertisers. For more information about ad reviewing, see this post: Adsense Ad Review [webmasterworld.com]

Additionally, Google mentioned (somewhere) that advertisers will soon be required to match the destination URL with the URL visible in ad text.