Is There a Way To Block a Specific Country, GEO

I need to block problematic countries

[vegasrick]

Here is my current problem. Adsense is fully aware of the issue, but the reps I've been dealing with have not really given me a solution.

For the last month, every day, I'm getting a mountain of views coming up in my daily reports from Vietnam and India.

This traffic is NOT real.

What I mean by that is this - there is little to no traffic from Vietnam or India being recorded by Analyitics or my servers.

I blocked both countries (via Cloudflare) from even accessing my site, but the views from Vietnam and India continued to grow every day.

I tried the same blocking method by way of my server settings and the same result, the views from Vietnam and India continued to grow every day.

Here is the rub. I tried a simple test by taking down our Adsense ads for 2 hours. And yes, the views from Vietnam and India continued to build at a rapid rate.

There are no clicks involved, because they are not actually seeing the ads. This some type of hack that is taking place off-site.

Because of the blocking methods that I used, I'm convinced that they are directly pinging my Adsene server with my publisher IP.

Besides being very annoying since my RPM number is much lower than it actually is, I'm worried that these views are affecting my overall CPC.

The Impression RPM is 0, Active View is 0 for these fantasy views from India and Vietnam.

The Adsense reps I spoke to believe someone is using my ad tags somewhere off-site. I only see one "unverified" site coming up that scrapped certain sections of my site and is using my ads, but they will NOT respond to any requests to take down the ads. Adsense is aware of the offending site.

[keyplyr]

The Adsense reps I spoke to believe someone is using my ad tags somewhere off-site.

I agree. That is the most likely reason so blocking is not a solution.

If the reps can't help (or won't) I would...

• get a new account with a new number

• update the ad code on your pages

• wait 30 days for the cached version of your pages to fall off

• then close the old account

• hope the perps don't scrape your new account info

If you're using Cloudflare, then ask your admin if you still believe blocking will help.

[vegasrick]

@keyplyr, I don't want to start a new account as I've been using this one for 13 years.

They claim that since I use the "verified site" feature that it shouldn't affect me in any way.

However, the Adsense reporting system is flawed, because it still includes off-site views into your overall averages and as a result it screws up all of your stats.

The following is on Adsense's official help pages, confirming that impressions still get recorded. I've already received 7K views from Vietnam alone in one hour:

"If a URL displaying your ad code is not on your list of verified sites, ads will still show on that URL, and impressions and clicks will be recorded. However, advertisers will not be charged, and you won't receive any earnings for that site."

[keyplyr]

Well then you may just have to live with the altered stats, at least until the perps stop, sorry.

[dolcevita]

You can always try to block IP ranges for specific countries:

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:35 pm (utc) on Jan 2, 2017]
[edit reason] Pls post URL. Google SERPs are generally different worldwide and change in time. [/edit]

[vegasrick]

@dolcevita, I've blocked the entire country and the views continued. It's not happening on-site.

Here is something interesting. I checked my Adsense logs to see which ad tags were getting these views. Between all of my tags, I only had "44" views from Vietnam, but there were over 34K views on my actual Adsense stats when checking by countries, which indicates that someone or something is just pinging the Adsense server directly with my publisher ID and not seeing actual ads.

[dolcevita]

Not sure of you have used IP ranges block for country from url below:
[ipaddresslocation.org...]

But if you have used then probably 95% of all visitors from that country will be blocked. Good luck