Stop Invalid Click Activity by AdSense Site Authorization Feature

Are you confident that you are following AdSense program policies? Are you sure no one using your ad code in websites that violates AdSense program policy? Are you getting revenue from all clicks? If, yes you should ignore this tutorial. If NO, please read these guidelines which may protect your AdSense account and avoid lost revenue.

We all know very well that in order to protect the advertisers, publishers and users at large Google treats policy violations and invalid clicks very seriously. I had already discussed program policy of Google AdSense and mentioned some examples about the invalid clicks and impressions in that tutorial.

Are you confident that you are following AdSense program policies? Are you sure no one using your ad code in websites that violates AdSense program policy? Are you getting revenue from all clicks? If, yes you should ignore this tutorial. If NO, please read these guidelines which may protect your AdSense account and avoid lost revenue.

We all know very well that in order to protect the advertisers, publishers and users at large Google treats policy violations and invalid clicks very seriously. I had already discussed program policy of Google AdSense and mentioned some examples about the invalid clicks and impressions in that tutorial.

Many publishers got their account disabled due to invalid click activity even they don’t know the exact reason behind that and not personally involved in it. It may be due to invalid clicks generated from the sites they don’t own and never place their AdSense Ad Unit codes into other blog/website or webpages.

That means someone might have copied your Google ad code and placed it on sites that does not comply AdSense policy. It may be the case that your site’s webpages have been shown within HTML Iframes. In some circumstances a publisher duplicated (copy and paste) your articles/posts into his blogs/sites.

Accordingly, you may get a notification message from Google as shown below:

“Your ads have recently appeared on websites you haven’t authorized. To avoid lost revenue, make sure to authorize any sites where you display ads by visiting your account settings.”

However, there are many other reasons for getting few impressions to sites that you have neither direct control nor your ad code is presently there. It may be due to serving your sites and webpages through other site’s server. For example search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.) served your contents searched results as cached pages through webcache.googleusercontent.com, translate.googleusercontent.com and cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx etc.

Moreover, Google may in rare cases send you a warning message to alert you that invalid activity found related to your AdSense account and ask for taking immediate action from your part to bring your AdSense account into compliance with AdSense program policies.

Here is an example of warning message from Google AdSense:

Affected website: example.com
Example page where violation occurred: example.com/example-page-url
Action required: Please make changes to your site within 3 business days.
Current account status: Active

Violation explanation: Publishers may not place ad code, search boxes, or search results alongside content which violates the AdSense program policies. This includes any inappropriate content which might be shared dynamically via live chat, instant messaging, or auto-refreshing comments.

Action is required to bring your AdSense account into compliance with our AdSense program policies. Please make changes to the above site within 3 working days. If you do not make changes to bring your site into compliance, ad serving may be disabled to the website listed above.

In this case your account may be reinstated by AdSense team after reviewing your circumstances if you makes necessary changes as may be required. And thereafter within 48 hours ads start running on your website as earlier.

Prevention is always better than cure. So, how to prevent such things which are not under your direct control and happening without your knowledge. There is a unique feature in your AdSense account named as Site authorization which prevent third party to use your AdSense Ad Unit codes without your permission. Thereafter, even if anyone is using your ad code to harm you it does not affect your account.

How to use Site Authorization to Display AdSense Ads

Step-1: Sign in to your AdSense account.
Step-2: Click the gear icon from top right and select Settings.

Step-3: From the sidebar, click on Access and authorization.
Step-4: Now, check the box marked Only allow certain sites to display ads for my account.
Step-5: Finally, enter the URL of the blogs or websites that you want to authorize, then click the Save button.

Keep in mind that you should add entire domain name i.e. example.com instead of www.example.com to authorize whole site. Following rules will help to add your site URL/domain name:

A) If you enter subdomain.domain.com then it only authorizes:-
subdomain.domain.com
subdomain.domain.com/pages

B) If you enter www.domain.com then it only works for:-
www.domain.com
www.domain.com/pages

C) If you enter domain.com then it will authorize the whole domain and sub-domain of site including the entire websites URLs:-
domain.com
domain.com/pages
www.domain.com
www.domain.com/pages
subdomain.domain.com
subdomain.domain.com/pages

Therefore, if you have blog on Blogger (BlogSpot) then use yourblog.blogspot.com and ignore http:// and www. However, if you are using custom domain then enter that domain name as example.com.

Within 48 hours the URLs you have entered will become the only authorized sites to show ads through your publisher ID. Note that all sites that you have added to your list of authorized sites will also be added to your Owned sites list.

All those site which have not been authorized by you may generate some impressions and clicks. But, don’t worry because it will neither affects your account nor any advertiser will be charged for that impressions and clicks.

However, if you place ad code on a site which you do not authorize will also show ads but would not generate any revenue for you. So, add each site you own and the sites/blogs you trust in the list of authorized sites to avoid lost revenue. In my opinion you should ignore all sites which are not yours.