Since the start of AdSense there has been a huge issue with people “stealing” the ad code and putting it on their own site. This could cause many issues with click fraud. This has been a personal security fear of my own for quite some time.
The Google AdSense team has finally released the feature which allows you to specific which sites you want to allow to display your ad code (with your publisher ID).
This is great news for all the real AdSense publishers out there. It’s creating a more pure market and actually now gives the publishers fiscal control over where the publisher ID is allowed to be used.
One thing that users do need to be careful of is that you enter the correct domain names. If you make a typo, that could be one seriously expensive typo. For a site earning $150 or $300 per day, I don’t think you would want to let that mistake run for too long.
But nevertheless, it’s great that the AdSense team has finally launched this feature. A long-awaited feature and a good one.
September 14th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
I’m not sure I understand WHY someone would take someone else’s AdSense code and put it on their site. Wouldn’t that just be making more money for the OTHER person who belongs to that code? Unless there’s some malicious intent - like trying to get the other person’s AdSense account shut down for fraudulent clicks - why would anyone do that?
September 14th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Daniel, that’s exactly the reason: to create invalid clicks. If someone wanted to take my publisher ID and throw it up on an adult website or on any type of site that violated the AdSense TOS, they could.
Now they can’t. I just finished writing another article as follow-up too, that sums up where you can see who is using your publisher ID.
Evil exists and do evil people. Why does anything bad in the world ever happen? Because people exist. It’s just something we must deal with in life, not everyone is honest.