AdSense Publishers Can Now Specify Allowed Sites
If you log into your AdSense console now, you’ll see that a new section called Allowed Sites has been added to the AdSense Setup tab, right after the competitive ad filter:
The allowed sites feature is something for which AdSense publishers have long been clamoring, the ability to give Google the list of sites on which they’re displaying ads. Because AdSense is so easy to implement, it’s also easy to abuse — before this feature was introduced there was no way to prevent anyone from grabbing your publisher ID and using it maliciously.
The default behavior is for your publisher ID to work on all sites. If you choose to only allow certain sites to show ads, however, you can specify a list of URLs that Google should use as a reverse filter — only URLs that match those in your list will count as ad impressions towards your account. The URL format lets you specify domains or subdomains, which means it can be used with Blogger accounts and other shared hosting situations. See the AdSense help for allowed sites for more details.
If you’ve been having problems, or you’re worried that you will have problems, go ahead and use this feature. Just don’t forget to add any new sites or blogs you create to the list, otherwise your earnings won’t go up like you’ll expect them to 
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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10 Responses to “AdSense Publishers Can Now Specify Allowed Sites”
I’m very confused.
Does this mean if you have a website and display Google ads that you can specify which ads are displayed — or — are you saying if you use AdWords to display ads on other sites that you can specify which sites to display your ads on?
If you’re talking about displaying Google ads on your own site to earn AdSense income, it seems like it would be more helpful to be able to specify which sites are NOT allowed to display ads (i.e., competing sites) instead of those that ARE allowed.
I’ve never used AdWords or AdSense, but plan to use both very soon. What am I missing here?
This is strictly about AdSense ads. The way AdSense works is that you take a snippet of JavaScript that Google generates for you and paste it on one of your web pages. The problem is that anyone can take that exact snippet and put it on their website… the ads will show and any clicks will get credited to you… which sounds good, but this opens your account up to abuse.
This feature lets you tell Google which sites are the ones you actually control and to only count clicks and impressions from those sites. So if someone “steals” your ad code you won’t run into any click fraud issues. This is strictly preventative and most AdSense publishers won’t use it.
And it has nothing to do with AdWords site exclusion (which is an existing feature that does what you think it does — allows you to prevent your ads from showing up on certain sites…)
BTW, ads will still show on any site that has “stolen” your publisher ID, so unless there’s click fraud involved Google ends up making more money because they won’t be paying out a share to an AdSense publisher. Cynics will surely dwell on this aspect.
Now, if Google REALLY wants to show respect for their publishers, they’ll institute a floor price for ads. I’m really tired of getting paid 2 cents for click for ads on some of my sites. I say they should set a nickel floor per click.
I realize this wouldn’t go over for arbitrgeurs, etc…but those aren’t the ones buying ads on my sites anyway. 1 or 2 cents per click is obscene.
Thank you, Eric. Now I get it.
Eric,
I am not sure I understand what problem this is supposed to solve.
Why would anyone want to “steal” my publisher ID? (it’s not really “stealing”, since I get paid on any clicks, so it should be fine if someone takes my ID, but why would they?)
Is there any way to find out if anyone is “stealing” it? I tried to Google my publisher ID, but got no results.
It’s a preventative measure. It’s you telling Google “these are all my sites and if you see AdSense clicks on my account anywhere else, you better take a good look at those clicks”. On the surface it seems OK for others to use your publisher ID, but then how do you make sure that the sites using your ID are following the AdSense program policies? If you list all your sites then you don’t have to worry about this potential issue. That’s all….
And no, there’s no easy way to find pages using your publisher ID, at least not yet. That’s because the search engines don’t index JavaScript code (yet).
Using this new “feature” results in no longer getting paid for clicks generated by people viewing one’s page in Google’s cache or when using an automated translation service.
I still don’t understand what would motivate someone to “steal” my publisher ID.
I wish there was a report of “foreign” clicks and a way to block selective URLs similar the “Competitive Ad Filter”
People may “steal” your publisher ID in order to cause you grief. That’s really the only problem.
I don’t recommend that AdSense publishers use this feature unless they’ve had problems in the past with ID misuse. I agree that an exclusion feature may be more useful.
With regards to the Google cache, Google could always allow these pages to count because it knows they’re just cached copies. I don’t know if that’s what they do, though.