Can I block my root domain and still earn with adsense?

[JS_Harris]

I set up my list of allowed sites back when you could add both the www and non-www version of a site, I included both. I only serve pages from the www version of my site and so had never had non-www ad impressions appearing in my adsense dashboard until recently.

That stupid spammer everyone seems to get(top1-seo etc) got me too and though I have blocked it from even accessing the site I began seeing non-www impressions as well. My logs indicate I have shown zero files from the non-www version of my site, not one, but adsense shows a bunch of them each day lately.

Can I safely remove the non-www version of my site from the allowed list and still earn revenue? If you have any suggestions on where these ghost impressions might be coming from too I'm all ears.

[JS_Harris]

"try it out" - done, and yes, you do earn money for clicks on www.example.com if example.com is not on your list of approved sites but www.example.com is. As it should be.

Those ghost impressions that I am not serving but are being reported as non-www though...

[Kurono_Kei]

@JS Harris
We have the same problem.
On the server level, we have 301 redirects for each page.

However, non-www version keeps appearing in AdSense stats. WWW version in Analytics and AdSense seems to be correct.
Server-side page views statistics is larger, but not nearly as much (we have more than 10.000 page views a day)


>>Can I safely remove the non-www version of my site from the allowed list and still earn revenue?

Tried that. Not working... After they changed owned sites setting they are counting non-www and www as 2 sites. Only sites added after the update are counted as 1. And as you said sites without www are still getting Adsense impressions/clicks with www.


Is there any workaround for this? This is not messing with the global RPM stats, but tomorrow they can as easily "hack" the www version of the site.

[JS_Harris]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !(www\.)?example\.com
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Any dangers with that up top of .htaccess ?

[lucy24]

!(www\.)?example\.com

I'm pretty sure what you mean here is

!example\.com

without anchors. Since the condition is unanchored, you don't need to say anything about www at all. You only need anchors if there are subdomains involved-- or, far less likely, if one of your domain names is contained within the other, like "example.com" vs. "badexample.com" ;)

Most of the time it's enough to use the regular domain-name-canonicalization redirect-- the one you've already got, further along in htaccess. If robots don't want to follow your redirect from "bogusexample.ua" to "example.com" (assuming someone is pointing their shady DNS at your law-abiding site), that's their problem, not yours. They don't have to make the new request, but you've done your job by refusing to serve content at their incorrect hostname.

[JS_Harris]

Thanks Lucy,

What I was seeing was yet another domain + addon issue, but on a different host this time. This host does not redirect addon.example.com to example.com/addon but it DOES resolve example.com/addon as addon.com via 301. The host disabled the ability to block a folder via htaccess of the primary domain if that folder is considered the addon domain root. Fortunately you can go to the addon domain's htaccess file and have it return 404 if it's not considered the host via the code above.

That's not ideal, the primary domain might 301 example.com/addon to example.com/addon/ before returning the 404 but it's better than nothing. Whoever is creating ghost impressions is hitting up the addon domain site via the primary domain (ie:example.com/addon) according to logs.