Your [month] earnings deductions and how to avoid them

[das_bends]

For the last three months, I've been receiving this email from Adsense. Anybody else been receiving it or am I just lucky?

It doesn't contain anything new besides what's included in the existing documentation regarding invalid activity.

[not2easy]

Are you taking any steps to try to deal with unwanted and non-human traffic?

[robzilla]

What range (%) of Invalid Traffic reductions do you usually see?

[das_bends]

Between 4% and 5%

[das_bends]

Are you taking any steps to try to deal with unwanted and non-human traffic?

Yes - added spacing, labels, blocked all TOR and proxy traffic, blocked most non-target countries.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

For the last three months, I've been receiving this email from Adsense. Anybody else been receiving it or am I just lucky?

I wouldn't call it luck :)

By the way, block data centers.

[puente]

By the way, block data centers.

have always been conflicted on this. i block/challenge some like ovh or hetzner but some have legitimate traffic, for example via proxy or vpn.

guess it's never a 100% science.

[das_bends]

How do you block data centers? I use phub.info

[puente]

to block data centers you have 2 options:
1- find all their ip addresses and block those in the firewall.
2- find their network number, known as asn, and block that in the more advanced firewall.

2 is a lot easier and faster because a hosting company normally has one asn allocated for their bgp/peering router that contains all their ip addresses including ipv6. however that requires peering level network access which many don't have. unless you use services like cloudflare. their firewall has the convenient block by asn option.

[das_bends]

Thanks just blocked digitalocean and friends with a cf firewall rule.

[JorgeV]

Beware, when you block a while ASN . Some, legitimate bots, can operate from IP within these ASN. For example DuckDuckBot.

[das_bends]

Yes, in the rule I put for CF to allow it's "known bots". For sure not comprehensive, but my priority is to get to the bottom of invalid traffic. I don't even know if data center traffic is really an issue as all my ads are behind a login, but we'll see.

[jr3074]

got this email too this month, did you fix this issue?

[lammert]

If your ads are behind a login, blocking data centers won't help. In that case I would suspect spacing between ads and content etc. Are any popup or pull-down menu's covering your ads?

[ronron]

Cloudflare Pro and Business plans can now - as of yesterday - challenge 'likely automated' traffic.

It works very well from what i'm seeing from my CF bot analytics and my own traffic logs.

[SweetPotato]

Make sure to block China entirely.
Believe me you don't need that traffic.
It's all bots, scrappers, spammers, ddos, etc.

[puente]

true that, first country i blocked was china and my only regret is not blocking it sooner. it was all risk and no reward.

[dolcevita]

For the first time yesterday i saw notifications in my account about 'earnings deductions and how to avoid them'. I thought wow this time will be huge clawback but funny thing is that i fought with high clawback since july 2020. From 10%-21%. All the time without any notifications.

And this time i got notification while clawback for March is only 4.5%. Is there any logic behind it?

But it is possible to fight against bot and malicious traffic.

With thanks to CF and advanced rules within CF firewall where i have added Captcha or JS challenged to China, Russia, Brazil etc... and of course TOR users and all or majority of corporate IP addresses and i finally got it. Clawback onder 5%.

[SweetPotato]

13% for March here. I noticed something weird i got 3 entries for "Invalid Traffic - AdSense for Content" in March while other months was always 2 max, and before that was always just 1 (with a few dollars).
24% Feb
14% Jan
8.6% Dec (2020)
25% Nov
23% Oct
4.8% Sept
4.8% Aug
5.9% Jul
5.6% Jun
8.9% May
21% Apr
20% Mar
7.6% Feb
4.4% Jan

I enabled "bot fight mode" on Cloudflare. But kinda late this month, i set to always captcha challenge Tor but that's it on that front.
Also, i don't know if important or not i disabled AUTO ADS, i'm using standard manually placed banners, has that anything to do? I don't know i'll tell you next month.

[dolcevita]

SweetPotato - check out my post by link below with CF firewall rules:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[IanCP]

Your [month] earnings deductions...

Deductions? For March I received + $0.08 that is no deduction at all.

Weird.

[lammert]

0.15% deduction this month. I am not complaining.

For those of you who are blocking all kinds of countries to prevent invalid clicks: My sites are multi-lingual and have full translations in both Russian and Chinese. Besides some smart DDOS protection, I do not do any blocking on country or IP level and ads are served to all countries.

[dolcevita]

Personally i do not block any country. Just JS or Captcha challenge countries with dubious traffic to be sure that it is really human and not automated bot. A couple days a go CF introduced new option - Super Bot Fight Mode where you can chose to block or challenge likely automated bots/traffic.