Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I can't reveal the URL of the company doing it, but you may want to see if your ID has been lifted from your site. (I checked somebody else's ID found via View Source, but Google doesn't have it indexed in SERPs.)
Hmmm... not sure it's a bad thing for me personally, but I do have a mixture of websites some of which are personal, some only business. That's because Google only lets publishers have one account, and that has been its strict policy for a long time/always.
In a related issue, it seems the same website that harvests your Google AdSense information also looks at Google Analytics IDs--the UA number.
Is it impossible for Google to give publishers privacy? Couldn't the snippet of Google Adsense code be set up by domain instead of the ID tag?
I don't know how many publishers would be interested in this but I suspect potentially a few. The bad news is I don't know of anything that can be done immediately on the publishers' side to enable privacy.
Speaking of privacy, even if you have Domain Privacy for every domain but one in your portfolio, but each domain gives away your AdSense ID, people can find out who you are via this site. This is good to know for anyone with a controversial site amongst a large portfolio of domains!
p/g
Google only lets publishers have one account, and that has been its strict policy for a long time/always.
I have several accounts (with Google's prior approval) - One corporate, one personal, another for a separate joint venture. It seems that all Google really wants is 1) a separate tax id, and 2) to know that you aren't scamming them.
And yes, someone harvesting AdSense Publisher IDs is disturbing, though I'm sure it's been going on longer than we all thought. After all, those Publisher IDs are sitting there just ready to be plucked...
[edited by: inactivist at 5:35 am (utc) on Feb. 27, 2009]
Is it impossible for Google to give publishers privacy? Couldn't the snippet of Google Adsense code be set up by domain instead of the ID tag?
One problem with that is some web sites have multiple publishers working on it. Other web sites use some kind of revenue sharing system.
Your search - "my pub id#" - did not match any documents.
I don't know of anything that can be done immediately on the publishers' side to enable privacy.
Identify their spider and the IP ranges they're coming from then block. More information here [webmasterworld.com].
Very odd thing. Could any legitimate use be made of this?
Mods - should we out the site?
well, I know two sites to spy google adsense id and I do use such database of trackable site IDs because it's a nice way to check what my competitors are doing. Also you may uncover site networks by spying on Adsense IDs and learn about quite a few interesting things
Now about how to keep them off your butt: it's not really possible as of now if they are determined to get your id... But you may make things more difficult for their bots by using a script that call your adsense script (encapsulating your adsense script in an other one i mean). but if the bot is collecting IDs once the page is in the DOM 9once html and javascript have been interpreted), then there could be not protection unless Google Adsense decides to add some new feature to create random ids on a site basis or ad basis.
Correction: it looks like they have a 'sitemap' of search result pages, so it appears they are at least trying to get all the IDs indexed by search engines.
they do not listen to, or even open, robots.txt files
Which is actually great if you have bot traps that block them automatically. Spam bots that follow robots.txt rules, slowly index your site from many different IP, with various user agent, and at a reasonable speed, are a lot more difficult. Did I say too much?
I think we aren't supposed to post IPs...
Discuss with incredibill. He's the Spider Mod. ;)
Finding and blocking those sites is a simple matter of Googling a pub id, finding out the ip of the site, doing an arin.net or ripe.net ip lookup then blocking the hosting company's ip range (if you have cPanel IP deny manager does it for you), but they could very well be crawling and populating their database from an adsl connection, which renders the above useless.
The interesting question is whether it is illegal to list someone else's pub id, and whether Google has a legal standing to go after those sites other than traffic starving them by removing them from the index.
Perhaps the owners of such sites know that their odds for monetizing are grim, and they are doing it just to gain notoriety.
and spookily enough, someone visited my site via the shadow site some 3 hours after I posted.
I don't think the owners of the other, more popular, English tool will care much about complaints. Everything looks rather shady. Some research on the info found in their (Hong-Kong) whois info reveals a stunning amount of criminal allegations, although I can't be sure if the registrant info also reflects the ownership of their site. The site is apparently hosted in the UK and payments are processed in The Netherlands. Fishy. Will Google care enough to find a solution for publishers? I doubt it.
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
// google_ad_client is global
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
...
But the Adsense bot may take exception to not seeing a proper ID and trigger an account review.
Or they can simply use domain or encrypted public ID for each ad slot.
It's been going on for years in other areas of online marketing it was only a matter of time before it hit the adsense side of things.
