Adsense ID Theft may be a cause of concern for most Adsense publishers because if your Adsense Pub ID appears on a site with Pornography, adult, or mature content, it could mean some trouble if you are not alert.Recently, someone copied the Adsense code of this blog and pasted it on a porn website. As the entire Adsense Javascript code was copied across including the Adsense Publisher ID, Google got the impression that the offending site that violated Adsense TOS was also owned by me.
I quickly received this warning email from the Google Adsense Team:
While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as site_url_removed.While this is just a warning email and you still get ads on other sites, the point to note is that you still run the risk of getting banned if similar violations are found in future. [something not in your control]
As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content. As a result, we have disabled ad serving to the site.
Your AdSense account remains active. However, we strongly suggest that you take the time to review our program policies to ensure that all of your remaining pages are in compliance.
Please note that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.
So I sent back an email to Google clarifying the things and few hours later, received the following email from Google AdSense Policy Enforcement team.
We request no further action from you at this time. If you find any other sites that are using your ad code, or if you receive additional notifications regarding violations on sites that you do not own or maintain, please reply to this email and we'll be happy to investigate the matter.This email from Google was definitely a big relief.
Unfortunately, there's no way to find more violations yourself because search engines won't help you find text inside the HTML source. So even if you google your Adsense ID, it won't help much unless someone develops an HTML code search engine.
Now if you have similar concerns and like to be on the safe side, I would suggest that you send an email to Google specifying a list of websites where you are showing the ads. If they know of other websites displaying Google Ads with your publisher id, you may as well ask Google to disable serving ads on sites/blogs not owned by you.
Related: How to Test Different Ad Layouts
Reader Comments
Suchthings happend to me in the past, but they didn't give any warnings :(
Written on 16/9/06 7:43 AM
Search engines do not index a page's markup as of now but that is really no required.
Google can simply keep a track of what sites (not pages, just the domain names) a particular AdSense ID is used. This they can then display in the the AdSense console for a publisher (you!) and you can flag sites that are not authorised to use the AdSense ID.
So I guess the right thing to do would be to send a polite email to Google AdSense team asking them to add this feature.
What say you?
Written on 16/9/06 2:00 PM
Have the same opinion as you. Did you read the last para of this story Varun ?
Written on 16/9/06 2:28 PM
What if google wouldn't send you a warning email? I heard a lot of storys how they ban people withouth a prior warning.
I hope this will never happen to me.
Written on 16/9/06 10:50 PM
Oops. I think I missed out on the last para. My apologies.
Written on 18/9/06 11:26 PM
The fault is in google displaying the Publiser ID in the source code. The best thing would be if google can mask the ID.
Written on 21/9/06 2:19 PM
I think there are some ways of masking the id. Using HTML Guardian or other source code encryption methods should hide the source code.
Is this possible?
-B
http://www.biomedicalwatch.info
Written on 6/11/06 9:14 PM
that's a great idea if google were to make mandatory your list of websites that could serve the adsense code.
if i can have an allow_access for a script hosted from another site so as to forbid spammers and scammers from accessing it, then google could do the same thing and I am sure they will if it turns into a big enough problem.
i guess the curious side of me is in amazement as to why people would do this. how are they benefitting? they are certainly not who would make the money if clients were to click on YOUR_ID ad from their site?
as recently as last week I discovered a protege [as a matter of terminology] who I handed a client site to for her to take care of.
turns out my new to the business of internet marketing friend copied the adsense code from my site and put it on this other. i am not keeping up with the stats for this other site so i never noticed it was my code.
going in for a re-design of this particular site i wondered why the adsense code was not showing. the site had recently - last time i looked - been mainly a phone dateline site. but by now it had morphed into more adult online "stuff."
surprise me. it was my code!
so again i have to say...ignorance prevailed here but why would a company snag a code that they wouldn't make money from?
until i am satisfied with that answer i have to think that your great idea won't be implemented by Google. Yet. :)
I'm glad they sent you an email. I never received such a thing.
Written on 22/12/06 11:49 PM