Stop malicious use of your AdSense account ID

AdSense's Allowed Sites feature, is an important safeguard for any blogger who is worried that others may try to mis-use their AdSense account and/or get them in to trouble.

The article is written with Blogspot users in mind, but the advice applies to ANY AdSense publishers.

Overview:

By Андрей! (Own work) [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

Previously, I've described setting up Adsense in Blogger, and putting AdSense ads right inside your posts.

The way that AdSense works with web-browsers, any person, or computer, can look at the source-code for you page (eg with the View / Page Source menu-option in Firefox), and see what your AdSense publisher ID is.   If they're clever or malicious enough they could potentially put ads with your publisher-id onto sites that don't meet AdSense's program guidelines (eg ones that encourage readers to click the ads).  And then they could report "you", and get you banned from AdSense for doing this.

Luckily, AdSense has the Allowed Sites feature to combat this.  Basically, you enter the  URLs (ie names) of sites you own, and only earnings from only those sites will be recorded in your account.  You aren't held responsible for any other sites where your publisher-id is used.


How to turn Allowed Sites on:

Log in to AdSense (www.google.com/adsense/)

Inside AdSense:

1. In the Home tab, choose Account Settings from the left-hand navigation list.
2. Scroll down to the Access and Authorisation section (currently at the bottom of the page)
3. Click the edit link, beside Sites authorised to show ads
4. Make sure that Only allow certain sites to display ads for my account is ticked
5. Enter the list of sites that you own in the Authorised Sites list
   (for each one, just enter the "naked domain", ie foo.com, not www.foo.com)
6. Click Save at the bottom of the section.

What do do next:

If you put your AdSense ads on any other blog or websites in the future, you do need to remember to add them to the Allowed Sites list.

Also, along with allowed-sites list, AdSense shows a list of non-allowed, websites (blogs and others) that have also tried to use your Publisher-id.   Check this occasionally, in case you've forgotten to add a new blog/website to the list, or in case you'e added a feature (eg the Translate this page widget) that effectively creates one.  The list is only updated weekly, so sites will still be on it for up to a week after you've allowed them.  However the Allow feature works immediately.

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Related Articles:



Setting up Adsense in Blogger

Putting AdSense ads right inside your posts.

Blocking categories of AdSense ads from your Blog

Putting an AsSense-enabled custom search engine in your blog