My Ads Showing On Google Pages

[ElvisFan]

I have always had ticked the box "Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account" and listed all four of my sites

Now I have a notice from adsense "
Your ads have recently appeared on websites you haven't authorized... "

The list includes the following
translate.googleusercontent.com
www.bing.com
www.google.co.uk
www.google.com.br
webcache.googleusercontent.com
images.search.yahoo.com
www.google.ca
www.google.de
www.google.com.au
www.google.com.ar
www.google.com.pk
www.google.hu

Can anyone explain why this has happened now after five years? And what can I do about it?

[Play_Bach]

Just means your ads are showing on those sites but you aren't getting paid for them. If you want to get paid, you have to add those sites to your account.

[ElvisFan]

Can I legally add these to other sites to my account? Or has csomeone scrapped my code with a page from my sites?

[Play_Bach]

Looks like it's just the search engines doing their thing and yes, you can add them if you want. There's a post somewhere around here from ASA about it.

[londrum]

has anyone made any decent money from doing that? i get loads of impressions from stuff like google translate, but always block them

[Play_Bach]

Found the post with ASA
[webmasterworld.com...]

[freelanceit]

@ElvisFan,

I started with just my four websites authorised now I have about thirty authorised sites, all of them are either google, google translate, bing,yahoo, or a host of other search engines. Now I just authorise them as and when Google notify me.

[freelanceit]

@Play_Bach,

Thanks for the link at least it explains what is happenning. Pity ASA couldn't now explain why the Google Crawler finds load of errors in my Robots.txt (numerous blocked pages) when all that is in the Robots.txt is:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

I have posted this question regarding crawler errors elsewhere but it looks as if no one knows the answer.

[SteveWh]

load of errors in my Robots.txt

If those are the only lines in your robots.txt, why not try emptying the file entirely (or deleting it) and seeing if that resolves the errors.

You're basically saying "don't disallow anything", which is the default when robots.txt is empty or missing, anyway.

If you are intending the * to be a wildcard, that format does not look correct to me according to the robots.txt standard. However, Google does pay attention to some nonstandard robots.txt enhancements, which I'm not familiar with.

----

I did some more hunting. I do not use the "authorized sites" feature, so I don't get warnings. However, in AdSense control panel, I do see numerous "crawl errors" listed, all of them blamed on Robots.txt.

However, the URLs (that the AdSense crawler supposedly tried to crawl but couldn't) all start with these (and possibly a few others):

hxxp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:...
hxxp://www.bing.com/images/search?q=...

I don't block any of those in my robots.txt -- in fact I can't because those URLs are not on my site!

So it can't be MY robots.txt that the crawl errors are complaining about! It would be the robots.txt files at the referenced external websites.

Maybe that's a partial lead toward an explanation?

[freelanceit]

@SteveWH,

Thanks for that information. The text for the robots.txt came directly from the Google website (can't remember exactly where I saw it, but this robots.txt has been on my website for almost 8 years with exactly the same text.)

The adsense crawler URLs that are supposedly blocked by robots.txt is basically the same as you have (see below) However, where I have indicated a ....... the text relates to my website and a specific page. The only thing that I have noticed is that at the end, i.e, .html there is usually a + sign and a continuation of text. Obviously this is a search string but why is Google flagging these so called errors now after almost 8 years?

[webcache.googleusercontent.com...]