Taken together, “Google” and “China” occasionally relate to censorship. If Baidu enters the conversation, “losing” might also come up. But in this case, it appears that a positive development occurred: Google China has introduced an “allow certain sites” feature for AdSense.
If you can read Chinese, then you can probably skip this article, as there’s a post about the new feature on Google China’s blog. So says Keith Chan, anyway – for all I know, some Googler gave out an old family recipe. Luckily, Chan was kind enough to do some translating for us English-only speakers.
“AdSense China has a new feature in hopes to protect publishers’ accounts from being sabotaged; they call it Allowed Sites,” he writes. “Publishers can enter a list of allowed domains (which they own) and only impressions, clicks and earnings generated from that list of sites would be reported in the publishers’ AdSense account.”
The point of this “is to prevent publisher IDs from being placed in spammy sites that do not belong to those publishers,” Chan continues. “Currently, you can enter up to 100 sites in to the allowed list, and it will take up to 4 hours before the list is activated. What is interesting is that ads would still show up in sites out of the list though any clicks wouldn’t generate earnings for the publisher, and there is no mention by Google whether advertisers are charged for these clicks.”
Google has mentioned, however, that it would like to bring this new feature “to all publishers,” including, presumably, those in the U.S. This is according to “AdSenseAdvisor,” who dropped in to comment on a thread at the WebmasterWorld thread. A hat tip is due to Barry Schwartz for pointing that out.
