Publisher ID Watcher

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Publisher ID Watcher

Finding out if any rogue publisher ids are used

jkovar

6:47 am on Dec 25, 2009 (gmt 0)

Is there a way through Adsense, Analytics, or maybe Webmaster Tools, that I can find out which publisher IDs have been used to serve ads on my sites ?

It would be nice to define specific Adsense publisher IDs that were allowed to display ads on a site, kinda like how you can define which sites are allowed to use a publisher ID but in the context of sites instead of publishers.

Reason being, it would be a nice effective intrusion detection for nasties that break into a site and swap out publisher IDs or setup scripts that only hijack the ID occasionally as not to attract attention.

If I could get an email any time a new ID was detected, or in the case of a white-list functionality when an invalid ID was detected, that would be awesome.

IanCP

7:12 am on Dec 25, 2009 (gmt 0)

I can't answer your specific question and up until a few days ago I'd have believed it was fanciful.

UNTIL

A friend of mine, very security conscious, had his site "hacked" by the "cialis people".

Home pages, random pages, robots.txt and .htaccess which now suddenly ran for miles [I have a copy]

So I believe it entirely credible, apart from Google safeguards and some of your own, that the "filth" can indeed substitute their own AdSense code on your site.

Heck, earlier this decade, some folks detected scum replacing any site's Amazon ID with the scammers.

So anything is possible.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 10:06 am (utc) on Dec. 25, 2009]
[edit reason] TOS #4 [webmasterworld.com...] [/edit]

incrediBILL

10:04 am on Dec 25, 2009 (gmt 0)

If I could get an email any time a new ID was detected, or in the case of a white-list functionality when an invalid ID was detected, that would be awesom

You can use site monitoring services that compare HTML to previous HTML.

At a minimum, if your home page changes without you knowing it, you'll find out.

zdgn

2:45 pm on Dec 25, 2009 (gmt 0)

I wish AdSense did away with one unique publisher ID and allowed site/domain specific IDs or multiple pub-IDs.

Thanks to scrapers that show which sites a particular AdSense publisher owns by scraping embedded pub-IDs in a page's html source, in theory a determined baddie who disliked a user-generated opinion on one of your small-time-sites can find out which other (bigger) sites you own. Who knows what click bombs they could deploy on your various web properties using your distinct AdSense pub-ID signature which makes it so easy to detect the different sites you own.

It could atleast momentarily make your AdSense life miserable until of course you sort out the mess with the help of your attentive and helpful AdSense support. :)

jkovar

2:20 pm on Dec 26, 2009 (gmt 0)

I reckon I should get around to setting up something on my home backup server that scours the rsync logs or something along those lines looking for changes to files. It would still be nice to have Google making the information available though, it would make it impossible to slip by undetected.

zdgn, I have to agree with the single publisher ID situation. Though, couldn't you get multiple Adsense accounts under multiple business names ?