Single ad view from pages that no longer exist

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I have several adsense units that no longer exist online, some of which have been offline for more than 2 years.

Starting roughly 2 weeks ago my adsense dashboard started reporting exactly one pageview for each unit from these pages. I've been trying to find the source but it simply is not online, not in Google cache, not on the wayback machine, nowhere.

Obviously it must be somewhere is what I thought but now I'm not so sure, every day adsense showing one pageview, for all of these offline ads. Just one, always one.

Is anyone else seeing a single pageview (without click) from old ads that were removed some time ago?

[incrediBILL]

Did you check Yahoo/Ask/Bing cache?

It's possible someone scraped your page and/or has a local copy on their computer.

[cien]

Yeah, I see that all the time with offline ads. Check "way at the bottom" of the "Allowed Sites" page under "Account Setup". It should be there, the site that is displaying your ad if the ad has been displaying for more than 1 week.

Let us know if you found the source. Most likely it is a scraper site or some site's cache out there. Probably bingj.com or googleusercontent.com

[Bddmed]

I've seen hits from sites like:
C:\Users\JohnDoe\Downloads\example.mht

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The sites don't show up in Google, yahoo! or bing anymore, and haven't for some time.

The allowed site filter in adsense doesn't show any sites I don't own displaying my ads.

It's almost as if someone has a cache of all my old sites and is using a crawler to visit each site once per day, one page only. I tried to catch the time of day today by actively looking for the single pageview in adsense once per hour and they all registered a pageview sometime between noon and 1pm. That, to me, further suggesting this isn't a human visit.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

And again today, like clockwork, all units on sites/pages that haven't existed in some time got one single pageview just after noon.

It's throwing the metrics of my adsense reporting off. All of the "average" data that incorporates number of units is skewed because of this.

Still no luck in tracking the source...

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

And again yesterday and today. One pageview from each of the same units.

I found some relief however, I think.

In my adsense account under setup->channels I went ahead and deactivated and then removed all of these ad units and they disappeared from my reports almost immediately. More importantly all of the report "totals" stopped taking the ad units into consideration, at least in my dashboard. I have no idea if Google will still include them in their calculations.

The units were absolutely not on any site I own, thank god I used original channel descriptions for each otherwise I'd never have been able to scan for them.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

RESOLVED, but with new questions.

Under adsense setup->channels I can indeed deactivate and then remove channels, the data disappears from your reports immediately. At the bottom of the page your "averages" are also instantly updated.

That raises a new question, at least for me. If the best adsense ads are served to the best sites it makes sense that your account results are an indication of how "good" your portfolio of ad spots actually is. So, if that's the case, is my account rated by the stats I see in my dashboard that I have some control over or are they rated by the totals which I cannot see that includes data from channel-less units?

If it's totals this pesky 1 page impression for units that don't exist online is a real problem, your averages would be way off. Every extra 1 impression channel gets a % of the total, lowering your averages in the process.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I finally tracked down the culprit.

webcache.googleusercontent.com

And a 3rd party bot doing a daily scrape from that.

FYI - the norarchive meta tag is ignored, my content is copied to that site despite having the noarchive tag in place for well over a year. The only thing the tag does is remove the link to it in Google serps, the cache happens anyway and Google has a copy of all web pages apparently. If you know what the url of your cache SHOULD be you can still visit your pages, and a bot is doing so on one of my sites (assuming it's not Google's own bot)

[cien]

Interesting Sgt. Regarding "norarchive meta tag is ignored",

1. Does the page still exist in your site?
2. When was the last time that page was cached?