Fight against spam

[rokramne]

Hi, I've been fighting for a long time against spammers in AdSense and they just come back with new domains, AdWords accounts and ads.

So share your best tips to pick them up at the Ad review center.

One easy way to find this Mindspark spammer that tries to get people to download a browser extension is to search for "index.jhtml" in Ad review center. This brings up all these download -advertisements.

And in General categories you can review ads with more precise categorization when you know from which categories spam normally comes from.

I always pick up the root domain and block it. Also block the AdWords account and then I do "Find related ads"-search. But that's all you can do and sooner or later you find the same stuff with new domains. I wish Google could give us better tools to fight against this spam.

[keyplyr]

Hi rokramne and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Agreed, the Adsense spam is a continuing issue, discussed here often. I'm not sure there is currently anything more to be done than what you're doing. Thanks for sharing that.

Blocking them seems like playing whac-a-mole since, as you said, they return with new domains but similar spammy ads. The spammers do get removed by Google but often it takes a while.

[Dimitri]

@rokramne, use the ad balance slider, and all these ads will disappear (after a couple of days, the time for the system to adjust).

For years, I've also been spending an hour each day, reviewing the ads , to block / ban this kind of ads. Then when Adsense introduced the ad balance tool, these ads disappeared by themselves. I experimented, by unblocking everything , and they are no longer showing anymore.

[keyplyr]

The ad balance tool (while it improved clicks) didn't remove a few of the the spammy ads I hoped it would, which I now assume are good earners for me. So I've learned to live with them :)

[NickMNS]

@rokramne welcome to WW and welcome to spam battle.

Had you posted this a few month earlier I would have suggested several tricks, but most have proven futile. But! this is a good "but"

As Dimitri Keyplyr mentioned Adsense rolled out the ad-balancer feature in early January, and this has been a game changer. There is a long thread ongoing about the use of the feature here: [webmasterworld.com...]

Depending on how aggressively you apply the balancer, you can eliminate or minimize the spam.

Also, as this feature is adopted by more and more publishers I theorize that the sites that don't adopt it will become spam magnets.

[farmboy]

The title of this topic is "Fight against spam". Not to be obtuse here, but, fight against which spam? Spam being ads that someone is paying to appear, another type of spam?

FarmBoy (I always thought warm Spam makes a good sandwich. Pickles on the side.)

[Dimitri]

I think @rokramne means ads "we" don't want on our site, that we block, and which keep coming back with different adword accounts, or URLs. An example, Mindsparks and their ads with the big green "download" button, which is showing in mass, from tons of different accounts, making them hard to get ride of. I think it might be considered as spam since, by blocking their accounts , we say "we don't want this advertiser", and since they keep creating new account to bypass blocking, this can be considered "spam".