I got that message earlier today and the site listed as unauthorized was bing. I previously had a couple of the others that you mention as allowed. I went ahead and added bing to my allowed list. Periodically I'll even see IP numbers listed and they've always turned out to belong to one of the search engines. My list of allowed sites has become a mixed bag of my own sites and search engines. I really don't know if that's the right way to handle it, but no harm has come from it.

"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."

Is there ANYWHERE where they give any hints at all about authorizing Google caches, Bing URLs, Yahoo URLS, IP addresses that always show up, google.com.xx, etc.? Australia, Philippines, Mexico? Or is it just too political to address? Surely, SOME general advice could be given. After all, they keep telling us to check them. Check them how? For what? Just asking. Or is it just too complex? (sometimes some are good, sometimes some are bad, etc.)

How about it?
Yes or no on each one -
66.163.168.225 (blank yahoo page)
74.6.116.140 (yahoo search page)
74.6.117.48 (yahoo search page)
74.6.238.254 (yahoo search page)
google.ca
google.com.au
google.com.ph
google.com.mx
www.bing.com

What do YOU do?

"... to avoid lost revenue, ..."

(You get the same ones as me, right? Plus others. And what about all those Google translate pages and Google cache pages that show up? White list those as well?

What are YOUR general rules on these guys?
I'm wondering. Where is the risk. Thanks a ton.
.

I got a couple today too
translate.googleusercontent.com
webcache.googleusercontent.com

Not changing a thing. I authorized my sites a long time ago. If I'm losing money from unauthorized sites, so be it.

Hello, we are also having this problem. Except we have a much bigger problem going on. We have rec'd the message twice about one of our top sites in two days. Some of our website content has been duplicated on two different URLs, and then a bunch of triple x content (just words) is thrown in. Our pubid was scraped too and is showing there, ads are showing. Although I enabled allowed sites feature, we got another email after that, saying this example URL has voilated the adsense program policies. But the sites we are rec'ing in these emails are not ours. Also, it seems the allowed sites feature does not appear to be working because these sites that duplicated us can still show ads on our PubID. What do we do? We contacted adsense via the contact us form and have rec'd no replies yet.

Received the message 2 days ago. It was due to www.google.com.ph and www.google.co.in which I happily added to my allowed sites list.

The alert message went away, but yesterday came back and it's still there now.

Bug?

ASA should clarify this once for all. Should we add those search engine url's/IP's to our allowed list or not?
I haven't till now since they are not MY url's or IP's, since that's the point of using Allowed sites.

Although I always see that there are unauthorized sites when I go to account settings page, from today morning I'm seeing this alert in red on the dashboard itself.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I spoke with the Product Manager and here is what they said:

"When using the authorized sites feature, any sites that you haven't authorized will trigger an error and a message. Note that we currently consider any framed or cached pages to be unauthorized, this includes when a user searches for your site from Google Images for example and your site displays via frame. We encourage you to add these framed or cached URLs to your authorized sites list. We're investigating ways to improve this feature."

I will alert this forum with updates as this feature is improved.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention!

ASA

ASA, thanks for the response. So if I've read correctly: for now, keep adding search engines (etc) to the authorized list, and hopefully the feature will improve/change in the future? Sounds good if so.

Exactly :)

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System: The following 4 messages were spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4275896.htm [webmasterworld.com] by incredibill - 9:02 am on Mar 3, 2011 (PST -8)

---

I had an adsence alert sayinjg my ads had been appearing sites I hadn't authorised and so I was missing out on income.

Three of the sites were Google so I have authorised those.

The others include Yahoo and Bing - are there any potential problems with authorising these

Oops - just found the existing thread on this subject - would like to see an answer though!

I just responded to the original post on this but will also c&p here just in case you missed it.


Hi everyone,

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I spoke with the Product Manager and here is what they said:

"When using the authorized sites feature, any sites that you haven't authorized will trigger an error and a message. Note that we currently consider any framed or cached pages to be unauthorized, this includes when a user searches for your site from Google Images for example and your site displays via frame. We encourage you to add these framed or cached URLs to your authorized sites list. We're investigating ways to improve this feature."

I will alert this forum with updates as this feature is improved.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention!

ASA

ASA,

Problem is I have no plans to authorize several suspect domains yet there is no "BLOCK" option to get that crud off the list.

Any hope to cure that soon?

To avoid lost revenue ...

We encourage you to add these framed or cached URLs to your authorized sites list.

I wonder just how much "lost revenue" is involved here.
Less than 1%? As much as 5%?

ASA - What is your estimate?
Fellow publishers - What are your guesses?

More importantly, is it worth the risk, since we are currently talking "unauthorized"? Does unauthorized mean "risky"? Even Google entities? Sounds like it. So, "encourage you to add" sounds like an iffy proposition, to me.

We all like to optimize our earnings, but for some, not "at any cost".
For some, prudence trumps earnings maximization.
At this point, I cannot add them, because the risk-reward ratio is so unclear. We simply don't know. Why take a chance?
.

Probably a silly suggestion but can't the adsense code be encrypted so that it only works with specific sites? Adsense would have to encrypt and decrypt (?) it of course.

It just seems to me very dodgy leaving the pub id in the source code for all the world to see. Surely there is a more secure method of putting the adsense code on our pages?

Problem is I have no plans to authorize several suspect domains yet there is no "BLOCK" option to get that crud off the list.

Any hope to cure that soon?

This is important feedback and we'll take this on board as we investigate solutions to this problem

I have about 20 google sites from multiple countries like co.ar, co.br and many more. How many countries are there in total where google has its domain?

I have facebook.com listed as an unauthorized site. I link to my site from my Facebook page, but what situation would cause my ads to appear on the facebook.com domain?

I'd authorize the following:

translate.googleusercontent.com
webcache.googleusercontent.com
google.com (and other extensions if needed)
bingj.com (bing's cache)
your sites here

Entering anything other than that it is risk to your account in my opinion.

I wanted to revisit this topic because the situation is becoming persistent. The warning appears in my account each day, and there is always a new entry in the unathorized list. They are, for the most part, various Google/Bing/Yahoo extensions. But rather obscure search engines are now appearing as well.

I had hoped after ASA's advice, that this would be a temporary concern. It isn't.

@dibbern2: Ditto. I think the system might be broken, too.

4-5 days ago I had the alert again, due to the Australian version of Google. So I added it to the authorized sites list.

But the alert is still there, almost a week later. I keep checking but no new 'unauthorised' sites are appearing. So I'm wondering whether the system's broken since it's showing a continuous warning without having any unauthorised sites.