"You've won an Amazon gift card!" redirects

Adsense redirects

[Tom1961]

A year or two ago my site was hammered with adsense redirects. They're back. So far all have said they see a pop up that can't be dismissed, saying they've won an Amazon gift card. When they click the x to close the pop up, they're redirected to another site.
1). What is the best was to handle these redirects?
2). If anyone has known offending urls, please post so I can add them to my blocked list in adsense.
Thank you.

[CommandDork]

I haven't come across these recently - was this on mobile or desktop? I find they attack mostly Android on mobile for me.

It's been an ongoing issue with Adsense since forever. As much as Google and its AI are touted, they do not seem to be able to stamp out this sort of advertiser abuse. You take the human element out of oversight for things like this and abuse is what you get. But God-forbid you mention "cockpit" on one of your own pages and Adsense throws a hissy-fit policy violation at you!

[RedBar]

These are re-directing on your server?

Are they "genuine" or have you been hacked?

I've never heard of this before so I have no idea or is it solely in your browser where you get the re-directs?

[child please]

Yeah this was really bad late last year and has been ongoing for a long time. I find that it happens almost always on smart phones - whether it be Android or Apple - and I also found that it is way more prevalent if you are serving desktop ads to mobile visitors - so in other words if you don't have a mobile or responsive design.

[keyplyr]

@Tom1961 - the only way you are going to stop this is to examine your server's access logs. If you have never looked at these logs, ask your host how to get them and save them to your computer.

The access logs are text files and you can use any text editor to read them. They are a record of every request to your website, every visitor.

You will quickly learn how to understand the information. Ask questions in the Apache Code Forum [webmasterworld.com]

Then when these redirects come in, you can see how to block them.

[Evan Salamanca]

I've always found increasing the price floors to be effective. Set the ad balancer to less ads and they should disappear.

[keyplyr]

@Tom1961 - my above comments assumed, as you said, it was your site that was hammered by redirects.

A year or two ago my site was hammered with adsense redirects.

However Evan Salamanca's comments present the scenario the ads are actually on your site and redirecting to somewhere else.

Which is it?