Weird malaria swf advert via adsense

[stuartmcdonald]

I'm seeing my error log fill up with thousands of requests for the filename "malaria_728x300_expanded_v2.swf" appended to the end of my site address -- so for eg.,
www.example.com/abc/def/malaria_728x300_expanded_v2.swf where the real page is www.example.com/abc/def

The file doesn't exist, but rather is a Google Adsense Image ad (in flash) for Malaria hotspots. I've been unable to see the ad live on my site, but it's in the error log -- hundreds to thousands of requests daily.

So I'm curious why would a Google adwords listing be calling a url on my site? and what I can/should do to get rid of it.

Any thoughts?

[netmeg]

Are you sure it's an AdSense ad, and are you sure it's AdWords calling it? Is your server returning a 404 for it?

728x300 is not a standard size, but there's that expanded in there. Sounds odd.

[coachm]

Don't know if it would account for the sheer volume, but my bet would be it's a "bad" flash ad. That is, it's supposed to be calling that file on the proper domain, but instead it's misconfigured to call it from the domain of the page displaying the ad.

Different ways to get rid of it? enter the ad in the competitive filter, use only text ads, tell google, or get really nasty and actually make an swf file to display putting in rude words (no, don't do that).

..it's pretty easy to mess up flash stuff, so it's probably something like that. I suppose if you were really dedicated you could get one of the flash grabbers/decompilers to see what's going on.

[stuartmcdonald]

netmeg: It's definetely an adsense ad.
coachm: I can't enter it into the competitive adfilter as I can't determine what the URL is for it.

will drop adsense a line and see what comes of it.

tks