Askjeeves AdSense

[ignatz]

I know, I'm slow to the party.. But I just noticed that:

a> I get a fair amount of traffic from askjeeves
b> they strip all of the adsense blocks out of my content, while framing the page.

Surely this is unacceptable (it is to me anyway). Is it Askjeeves or Google nixing the ad blocks? I'm interested to know what my fellow adsense publishers do about this..

[Macro]

cmendla, thanks. I'll try that out on another PC.

Hope ASA has a very good response - like the imediate termination of ask's account.

I can't see any terminations. I agree that it should be banned but the bigger the culprits the harder it is to get them banned. Like hotmail, they'be been doing this (the frames) since day one!

[zoltan]

Yes, framing is OK, but replacing our adsense code with their is definitely not a good business practice.
And I doubt google will terminate ask's account I am sure their arrangement involves many "Fedex" checks / month, so if google will ban them, they will loose an important partner and revenue.

[gethan]

I don't know how they are doing this. I've looked in to the code more fully.

1) The frame is src'd as some horrible url going through an ask.com referer.
2) The publisher_id and channel etc are actually correct in the source of the page.
3) Javascript is run while setting up the frames - though I haven't seen anything that would/could replace id's on the fly.

So it's either a bug in adsense or ..... fill in blanks not a nice scenario.

Can anyone supply a search that results in a frame and properly attributed adsense? sticky me.

Added - this is affecting even the case studies.

[olias]

So it's either a bug in adsense or ..... fill in blanks not a nice scenario.

It is a bug in AdSense.

I just tried this out with my site and sure enough the style of the ads is all wrong - it has defaulted to the, er, default style. The reason seems to be that as has been pointed out the full url in your browser window gets sent as your location (which is sort of understandable because i am not going to use the adsense in frames option when my site doesn't use frames).

The problem with the wrong ad style comes about because of the huge ask url that gets passed to googlesyndication.com basically it overflows the maximum size of a GET request and means that some of the parameters dont get sent.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

Thanks to everyone who sent emails! It was a big help.

What appears to be modified by AskJeeves is the 'Ads By Goooooogle' link, which has a referrer inserted for the AskJeeves search results page from which a site is viewed from. However, the ad URLs themselves aren't being modified. Hopefully this will be reassuring news.

Several publishers have noted that AJ strips sites of the Google ads. Could someone clarify as to whether that means the Google ads are actually disappearing from the pages, or that the code's being modified (as described in the previous paragraph)?

Also, if you're concerned about the ads being mis-targeted when framed through AskJeeves (which they most likely are), I recommend updating your ad code with the special frames code found in your AdSense account as others have already mentioned.

Thanks everyone!
ASA

[Never_again]

Could someone clarify as to whether that means the Google ads are actually disappearing from the pages, or that the code's being modified...

In our case, the Google ads are not actually disappearing from the pages. But the ads are being modified -- border color, background color, etc.

There is no way to know how of if the actual code is being modified. If you do a right click on the page and "view source code," you don't see your pages code -- just some code and script from AJ.

[olias]

In our case, the Google ads are not actually disappearing from the pages. But the ads are being modified -- border color, background color, etc.

I think this will be because the url parameter that is being sent is so big there is no room left to send the details of what border color and background color you want so it just gives the default. So the white background with dark blue border.

There is a handy plugin for Firefox that shows all the header information being passed around which is very useful for this kind of thing and slightly easier than going to the effort of packet sniffing.

[Jenstar]

The background color is sometimes the one specified by the publisher and other times is not. But the border, and all the text colors are set to the default AdSense colors, instead of the ones specified by the publisher. So they are definitely changing it in someway.

The publisher ID seems to be intact.

Could they be attempting to show ask.com as being the referrer when a visitor clicks on the AdSense ad? This could result in a site believing ask is delivering more traffic than it actually is.

Something else I noticed, the first ad unit will sometimes show PSAs, while the second ad unit will show targeted (if it was a lack of inventory issue, the first ad unit in the source code should be the one showing targeted ads). This definitely shows that something is going on with ask doing something.

[gethan]

Olias > The problem with the wrong ad style comes about because of the huge ask url that gets passed to googlesyndication.com basically it overflows the maximum size of a GET request and means that some of the parameters dont get sent.

I think Olias got the problem nailed here, but it occours to me that if the color parameters are not being sent through correctly - there is every chance that the publisher_id isn't being passed as well. So the clicks would disappear into the ether.

ASA > Also, if you're concerned about the ads being mis-targeted when framed through AskJeeves (which they most likely are), I recommend updating your ad code with the special frames code found in your AdSense account as others have already mentioned.

This is great for us - but - what about the millions of adsense publishers who are unaware of this problem. Maybe changing the default behaviour of adsense to that of inframes would stop this?

Thanks for getting back to us.

[olias]

Luckily the publisher id is the first thing that gets sent through along with the ad format, the channel id and the alternate ad url so all the tracking should be fine.

There is also a parameter 'dt' that is some form of id and is only sent on these framed pages, not sure what that is about.

The total length of the querystring seems to be limited to 950 characters, which should be plenty enough. But remember to keep you urls below about 600 characters long otherwise AdSense might not display properly. If you go over 700 charcters Google may not even manage to crawl the correct url. ;)

[killroy]

Hmm, any change to rearrange te get parameters to place hte referer url last?

SN

[ignatz]

Several publishers have noted that AJ strips sites of the Google ads. Could someone clarify as to whether that means the Google ads are actually disappearing from the pages, or that the code's being modified (as described in the previous paragraph)?

My ads WERE being completely stripped. Today I check again and they are showing up, but with new issues:

-on some ads, the targeting from the "evil framed page" is totally wrong compared to the original non-framed page. All of the framed pages are showing some BS about "fix your browser" and "internet explorer error". Thanks Jeeves.
-Colors are fubared

Weird that they were *disappearing* over the course of the day when I first posted this message, and now they're showing up..

[Broadway]

Could someone please spell this out for me? What is the solution so MY adsense ads show in PROPER FORMAT when displayed by Ask Jeeves or some other framed using site?

1)Do I need to use a frame buster script like the java script code given in this thread?

2)Will just using the "special frames code found in your AdSense account" that AdsenseAdvisor mentions take care of this without using a separate "frame buster script"? Is there any reason not to use this Adsense account option?

3)Are there some reasons why I should be using both approaches to solve this one problem?

[oneway]

I am in shock! I also reported it as well and used the frame break script. I am not a big contender, but I work hard for my money!

I still can't belive that Ask Jeeves would do that!

[oneway]

For those who are farther into the thread - and may have missed this.....

[webmasterworld.com...]

read down this page again. I not only shows the frame breaker, but the reason.