Jensense writes that a growing number of publishers are seeing hackers edit their websites, substituting the publisher’s AdSense ID for another, in order to basically steal that publisher’s revenue.
Additionally, we’ve heard stories of AdSense IDs getting used on sites not owned by the person who controls the ID, resulting in charges of click fraud, among other problems.
The reason these things can happen is that Google does not have a verification process for AdSense, making it real easy to do crazy and evil things to unwitting users, who may never realize they’ve been hacked. There’s no way to list all your domains in AdSense’s control panel, so that your ads never turn up where you don’t want them, and there’s certainly no way to claim your own website, in order to prevent other AdSense IDs from stealing your page views.
Even if Google doesn’t want to invest in verification, I’m sure it would be a simple matter to display on the AdSense control panel (a) a list of all domains currently running your publisher ID and (b) a list of all other publishers running ads on sites you run ads on (the implication that, in most cases, if there’s more than one name on the second list, we’ve got a problem). A simple list would at least alert publishers that there might be a problem, and then they can let Google know not to penalize them for it.
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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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