Some sites do well with very few sites in their competitive filter. Others have their filter constantly full.

About the only thing you can do is try emptying your filter and see what happens.

Make a copy of the filter list so you can repalce it in a hurry if you want to.

It might be a good idea to check out the sites in your filter list and see if they even exist anymore.

I suspect it could take at least a day or so to see results one way or the other.

I have maybe 20 sites in my filter.

newborn - there have been months when my filter was empty yet I still received that optimization tip.

FarmBoy

The optimization tips can be safely ignored IMHO.

Still managing your filters is something you'll have to do as the 200 entry limit prevents you from doing a "once in, never out".

Managing your filters is overly hard esp. if it's long as you've no idea which entries are still blocking how much ads.

I used to have full filters, at a given point I dumped them due to it being way too hard to manage and now reserve them for the worst of the worst. I keep those in a Hotel California fashion ("You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!") while crossing my fingers for a significantly better solution from Google before I run out again with these real bad apples.

Wow!

farmboy, if yours is empty and you still get the report, that sounds like madness. maybe ASa could loook into that. I basically am just trying to see if it will affect my earnings one way or the other.

So I just emptied mine. I actually use the MFA blacklist site to find these sites. How do you actually find those site BTW

maybe ASa could loook into that.

Making that request is probably not a good use of your time, but do what you think is appropriate. Most publishers who have been on this board for a while have learned to either ignore those optimization tips or take them with a huge grain of salt.

FarmBoy

well said farmboy. I have ignored them for the past 6 months.

There was a post here recently about Google tracking browser activity and serving ads dependent on individual page view behaviour. I wasn't aware of this but some people were. Before I read this post, I thought ads were dependent only on page content and geo-targeting, not what sites people had previously been viewing.

This got me to thinking. If the ads for every individual are different and served to match that person's browsing behaviour, how do I know which ads to filter? Previously I had used the Adsense preview tool and blocked ads I thought were inappropriate but these ads might be VERY appropriate to certain people.

Also, if I filter an advertiser I don't know how much their ads will pay. Maybe I am blocking high paying ads?

I decided that I wasn't smart enough to outguess Google's algorithms and cleared my filter list. The next day my earnings were higher than they had been for several months. This didn't last long unfortunately! They dropped again but the average now is still higher than the average before when I had a populated filter list.

As ken_b said, you can try clearing your list but make a copy first. It's easy to keep as a text file and if your situation gets worse after clearing the filter list you can easily replace it. My filter list is still empty and I have no immediate plans to start playing with it again.

If you are blocking ads using a general MFA blacklist, how do you know that the sites on that list will ever appear on your site unless you see them? If the filter was an unlimited size this might work but with only 200 I don't see how working from a general list will be very effective.

With regard to MFA and arbitrage I'm just leaving that to Google to fix and I think the situation is gradually getting better.

Here's the post I was referring to:

[webmasterworld.com...]

If the ads for every individual are different and served to match that person's browsing behaviour, how do I know which ads to filter?

Ads aren't necessarily always served based on that person's browsing behavior. Sometimes maybe, but not always.

Previously I had used the Adsense preview tool and blocked ads I thought were inappropriate but these ads might be VERY appropriate to certain people.

The filter is good IF you see an ad on your site that you REALLY don't want to be displated to your site visitors for some reason. Beyond that and it pretty much becomes a wild goat chase - not worth the time and effort - because there are so many unknowns.

FarmBoy

The optimisation report is not a custom report based on your circumstances. I ignore it because it is always the same set of recommendations, whether it be for my site or sombody else's.

FarmBoy, thanks for your explanation and thanks for providing a lot of good input into this forum. Yours are posts that I always take the time to read.

It was around the time I cleared my filter that I decided I was going to stop chasing wild goats! As you say, there are just so many unknowns.