Increasing use of Adsense blocking methods

[TA Message Board]

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We've been running adsense for around two years now and it had been performing well. For the last 6 months though I've noticed income starting to decrease and started investigated further.

By the looks of it Google is reporting our page impressions about 1/5 below our own stats. Our stats for one day 51,000 - Google reports 40,000.. We produce our own stats using phpadsnew on actual forum views, so it's not based on awstats or webalizer stats.

Googles online documentation says that the difference could be due to robots crawling our site - but our site is blocked to all robots apart from the adsense bot. Our stats shows this bot not generating anywhere near the missing 1/5.

It looks like more and more people are starting to block the pagead2.googlesyndication.com web page via lmhosts files etc. If it were banner blocking software blocking the ad's it would also be blocking the 1 pixel image being servered by PHPadsnew

I've tried the Miva version of adsense and it generated 2 clicks on 50,000 impressions. Not exactly usefull.

[John Jupp]

The new IE7 default blocks Adsense, particularly when using non Microsoft firewalls. You have to make physical changes to your display levels on your PC to allow them to appear. This is because IE7 demands you switch to default settings and overwrite your normal security setting. Then after restarting the PC you can then manually change settings again and IE7 will then allow you to see Adsense.

[kevquinlan]

Sorry John but not sure where you have seen that?
Briefly a beta version of IE7 was set to High security as default and this restricted java such as that used by adsense - however this was unintentional and the final version of IE7 that is currently distributed does not block adsense.

the big AV firms such as Mcafee are always tinkering with affiliate links and advertising - they would be my first suspicion.

[John Jupp]

Sorry John but not sure where you have seen that?
Briefly a beta version of IE7 was set to High security as default and this restricted java such as that used by adsense - however this was unintentional and the final version of IE7 that is currently distributed does not block adsense.

the big AV firms such as Mcafee are always tinkering with affiliate links and advertising - they would be my first suspicion.

That must be it. The Beta version. Downloaded it, half killed my PC. Uninstalled it and won't ever go near it again. If people have installed the Beta they won't have installed any further updated version will they?

[kevquinlan]

If they were scared off by buggy beta versions then probably not - however if anyone is using any version of Internet explorer or Beta versions then they will have automatically got the latest versions with widows update - its almost impossible to avoid!

Back on thread - there are rumours of default installations of Norton and Tred AV blocking adsense and an adblock plugin for firefox but i would not imagine these to make a significant impact on stats yet.

I think it is not in any major software vendors interest to upset google with a default block on their biggest earner?

Have you tried google analytics or similar to try to see what is going on with your site?

[axod]

Googles online documentation says that the difference could be due to robots crawling our site - but our site is blocked to all robots apart from the adsense bot. Our stats shows this bot not generating anywhere near the missing 1/5.

Yeah I'd check there again... Saying your site is blocked to all robots is false. Saying it's blocked to all *known* robots is more accurate. Not all robots say they are robots. They might even use standard user agents. Might even use loads of different IPs...
Might be worth checking anyway.

[gunneradt]

I'd love to see more browsers blocking adsense. Maybe Google would not then play around with their algorithm so much. I am sure they did that to push web owners to adsense.