Someone using my adsense code on their site.

Ever had a competitor post your adsense code into their site?

[foxtunes]

Anyone ever had a competitor paste your adsense code on their site?

A few weeks ago a company (turning over millions of dollars a year) emailed me asking if I'd offer their products on one of my sites....They offered to pay me commission on any sales...I refused, I also refused their offer of a link exchange....what suprised me was it was the owner of the company not a sales rep, or webmaster.

Today I find a page from this site running adsense (with my publisher id) They also copied paragraphs of text....(Strangely from an archived version of my site)

I notified Google that code from my account was appearing on an unauthorised site..They got right back to to inform me that they disabled ad serving to the other site....Great prompt response, thank you adsense support.

I can only imagine this company was trying to have me banned by running my google ads, or maybe they just cut and pasted a whole load of text including the google code and pasted it into their page?

If someone pastes adsense code from another publishers account into their site (without permission) does that make them liable for copyright infringement?

I've saved screenshots, I have the site in google's cache....

Normally when folks have copied text before, i just send off a cease and desist and it's the end of the matter, but these have just been one man bands like me....I'm up against a big cheese, and they're liable to play dirty.

[ogletree]

Why would you want them to stop. They are giving you money. Anybody that wants to can put my code on their site. They obviously tried to copy your site and did not know they copied the code. You should have just taken the free money.

[foxtunes]

I didn't want to risk my account by having my code on a dodgy page....Plus the page is cloaking, offering chunks of my text, then it redirects to their site.

[HellaCooL]

I don't think that Google would ban you for that.
Anyone can copy your code and put it on the spam website.
Then it would be so easy then to eliminate the competition.

[Palehorse]

No, it makes sense.

He was probably eventually going to report the throwaway site to google as "cloaking" (anon of course). Trying to get him banned by google.

[Webtoolpros]

Yeh it is a good thing to report this to Google, not that they would care anyways.

It seems to me that as long as your account has any fraudulent clicks whatsever coming from whomever, they delete your account.

Another tip is not to put a search box on your site. Somehow when I did that to my web sites, one of my competitors thought it would be nice to search a high paying keyword such as "mesothelioma around 100 times" on my webmaster related site.

Next thing I knew was that Google disabled my account, but sent me a check for $1200 for that month.

Google Adsense stinks when you have competitors that hate you out of spite or competition. Anyhow, I've moved on to other affiliate programs...

I emailed them saying that I had not clicked my site and they could keep their $1200, but they insisted that my account had invalid clicks.

[HellaCooL]

I cannot believe that they cannot figure out how to get around things like that.

[iProgram]

A quick question: is there a way to find which sites (not mine) are using my publicher id? On the other word, which search engine can crawl javascript code?

[blueheaven123]

how do you detect if someone else is using your adsense code?

[foxtunes]

"how do you detect if someone else is using your adsense code?"

I noticed I was getting hits from a strange url....I visited the url but it was cloaked and redirected so quickly I couldn't see anything....So I went to google's cache of the page....There it was portions of my content...I did a view source and noticed the adsense code had my publisher id.

[suidas]

It would be nice if the tracking URLs feature could somehow tell you when clicks were coming from pages that weren't yours. So, instead of tracking [mysite.com...] you would enter "-http://mysite.com/." Better yet, Amazon provides a simple list of sites that have my associate ID. Seems like an easy fix to me.

Incidentally, using someone's Adsense code is not a violation of copyright. It's many things--fraud, unfair competition, a violation of Adsense policies, etc. but copyright requires stealing *creative* content, and it needs of some substance (ie., length).

[Webtoolpros]

I think adsense would be more secure if Google allowed you to enter a list of your domains that your own adsense code would appear on.

By this I mean, the adsense ads would only show on domains you enter in your adsense account.

That way if someone tried to ad your adsense code to their site, it would not work. Google may be coming out with more secure features, but thats just my idea on security.

[anallawalla]

I think adsense would be more secure if Google allowed you to enter a list of your domains that your own adsense code would appear on.

I'll second that. All in favour...

[morpheus83]

Quiet strange that a company as you say turning million of dollars would do something like this.

[HughMungus]

I cannot believe that they cannot figure out how to get around things like that.

Hell, I can and I just thought about it for 2 seconds. "Enter your website's IP here" in the settings.

[whoisgregg]

Some hosts will change around IP addresses without telling you. It could just use the name, "example.com" or perhaps URL channels could be a requirement instead of an option to cover the off chance someone's only site was at a "example.com/~userfolder/" type hosting environment.

[ownerrim]

suggestion for google: allow an option for publishers to indicate, in their account information, a list of urls for which their publisher ID is valid. This would be optional for publishers, but it would be a way for adsense to immediately discount any clicks generated from a non-webmaster-specified url.

[walrus]

<I'll second that. All in favour...>

Aye! A great idea!

[ownerrim]

Holy DMCA, Batman! I didn't even notice that someone else had come up with the same idea.

[webmastertexas]

What field are you people in that you have competitors trying to sabotage you? I find it very strange that this actually happens (although I don't doubt that it does). I guess the Internet is a more brutal place than I've been confronted with.