No, this is not the latest rule for Adsense™ publishers! However, the way the Adsense management works, it is better to use the whitelist than be penalized later on for the actions of someone else!
It is possible that you have a competitor, an old enemy or your ex who would do anything to put you down, and chances are that they are already well-acquainted with Adsense TOS-especially how to use it to shut down another person’s account! :)
So what do they do? They just copy your Adsense ad code from your website and paste it on to theirs-which happens to be, say, a porn or gambling site. Needless to say, this goes against Adsense TOS and your account would be shut down as soon as the Adsense team discovers it, irrespective of whether or not the site belongs to you!
Don’t believe me? See what happened to Digitalpoint forums!
That DP got banned from Adsense is now old news. The good news is that – no, not the fact that their Adsense account was reinstated shortly after- the good news is that they have learned their lesson and built their own advertising platform –a system over which they have full control, unlike Adsense! ;)
Apparently, at the time of ban they WERE using the Adsense whitelist, and even though they were assured by a Google™ representative that their account is safe as long as the gambling site displaying their Adsense ads is not in their whitelist, they got banned anyway (probably because they had started using the whitelist only recently)! What later followed is quite typical of Google-Google realized their mistake in banning a publisher as large as DP, so a formal "apology" was sent which was followed by account restoration!
I included this part to let you know that Adsense can ban you in spite of using the whitelist. So does that mean that the whitelist is useless? No. It is just a preventive measure, quite similar to locking your door with a lock. Just as you cannot guarantee the safety of your house just by locking your doors, you also should not believe that "Now that I am using the Adsense whitelist, I am protected from all harm!" :D
At the very least, the whitelist offers you a "sense of security"-as is the case with most security solutions out there-and this feeling alone is what ultimately offers you the much-needed mental peace and the urge to drive forward to new ventures! We all like to feel safe, we all like to believe that we are not being spied upon, even if such beliefs may not be true!
Setting up the Adsense whitelist is really easy. You just need to login to your Adsense account, click on "Adsense setup", then click on "Allowed Sites".
Here is the direct URL which should take you there:
https://www.google.com/adsense/publisher-whitelist-view
There, under "Choose your site settings" choose the "Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account" option. Then enter a list of all the domain or subdomain URLs which should show your Adsense ads. Be careful when using the whitelist: you must enter all the domains/subdomains where you want your Adsense ads to show, because the sites that are not in the whitelist won’t earn you any cash, even though they would be able to display the ads just fine. You should also update the list periodically, so that your new Adsense sites are also whitelisted!
It is a good thing if all the sites present in the whitelist belong to you. If you also whitelist sites such as Hubpages, Blogger, etc., other users of these services would also be able to display your ads; thus, the whitelist won’t be able to offer you the kind of protection you want!
I feel that the whitelist option is not for everyone, especially for those who have ads displaying on sites they don’t own, but for the rest, it is a good tool to use!
Every week Adsense would show you a list of sites that have displayed your ads in spite of not being included in the whitelist. So far I have only gotten false positives: that is, a couple of subdomains-both belonging to Google-showing my ads! :D But I will see how it goes. ;)
One extra free advice from the Nuttie Guru: if you want to b*tch about Adsense, make sure there are no Adsense ads or search box on your site, or you may get nuked for b*tching! :D ;)
This actually happened to me fairly recently. Our client’s website got a HUGE number of backlinks out of nowhere which didn’t make too much sense.
Upon further research we realized that someone had been using an automatted submission site as well as many SEO techniques that are HIGHLY blackhat.
Now–it wasn’t me since I’m his SEO; however, further research revealed it was actually his competitor who was attempting to get his site banned from Google.
I guess the moral of the story is that your competitors cannot be trusted. Especially on the net–where they can easily taint your reputation.
So great tips, great post
Arindam,
You said, “Then enter a list of all the domain or subdomain URLs which should show your Adsense ads. ”
If I did that I would lose possibly 90% of my Adsense revenue? What am I missing? (I’m sure I must be missing something)
>>If I did that I would lose possibly 90% of my Adsense revenue?
How? Do u have ads on sites you don’t own? If so then the whitelist may not be for you, as I already mentioned. :)
I have Adsense on most of my sites. I built the sites with Adsense in mind.
I also use Adwords to advertise some of my sites. I would not want any of my sites to be on gambling or porn sites.
Sorry, Arindam, I am still confused about this. If I am trying to control the sites that appear on my Adsense sites, then, sure, I don’t want the bad sites to appear. But we have no control over what sites appear on our sites that have Adsense on them and Google does extremely well keeping that clean.
So, Adsense will allow me to pick the sites I want to show my ads. Does that mean they will be shown on those sites at all times or even at all?
I think I see what I missed. Google says “Use this page to identify the URLs that are allowed to display Google ads for your account.” The key phrase is “allowed to display Google ads for your account”
I would simply be telling Google that if my account appeared anywhere else, don’t give me credit because they would have to be stealing my account number.
Is that correct?
>>I would simply be telling Google that if my account appeared anywhere else, don’t give me credit because they would have to be stealing my account number. Is that correct?
If ads containing your adsense ID appear on domains that are NOT on your whitelist, Google would display the ads as usual but impressions/clicks won’t be counted. Google would also show u a list of domains where ur ads are appearing but which are NOT on your whitelist. U decide what to do with that data. :)
Is everything clear now? :)
Thanks for pointing out the whitelist. I have a website thats making some decent cash via Adsense so I need to protect it via whatever means I can. I could see people doing this to disrupt people placed higher in the SERPs. Nasty trick.
Has anyone ever heard of someone’s adsense code being used without permission to attempt to ban a competitor from Google?
I have a friend in this situation, and we’re really not sure what to do.