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Adsense publisher ID scraping

         

numnum

7:20 pm on Oct 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Was it Blekko, or was it some other search engine, that had scraped Adsense publisher IDs from many, many sites and had provided a link entitled "adsense" just to the right of the page title on its SERPs? I seem to recall that it was Blekko. If so, it looks as though they've discontinued that. Perhaps they're offering this information for a fee now. Or perhaps Google strong-armed them into stopping. Does anyone know?

I'm asking because I was, shall we say, "upset" to discover that anyone could so easily connect my disparate sites to a common account and hence connect them all to me. Of course, in retrospect I should have established different Adsense accounts for different types of sites by setting up different legal entities -- but that's water under the bridge.

DaStarBuG

8:08 pm on Oct 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



It is blekko and it is still there, you just need to add the slashtag /adsense

koan

8:16 pm on Oct 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Blekko is not the only one either. And other web sites do the same with your Google Analytics ID too. At least with Analytics we can modify the code, so I use a javascript variable create in another file to place my ID, not as easily scrappable.

The things we have to do to keep a certain level of privacy and protect our sites... it never ends.

Leonard0

8:42 pm on Oct 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Is hiding our Adsense publisher ID from scrapers really considered "modifying the code"?
As long as the correct id gets passed to the Adsense script it should be okay, though admittedy I haven't done it yet.

Sgt_Kickaxe

5:05 am on Oct 4, 2011 (gmt 0)



Blekko isn't alone. Several adsense spy websites as well as several popular SEO sites monitor your unique pub-id AS WELL AS your unique analytics ID if you use analytics.

Not only that but some store the ads they see and record the site that the ad leads to in order to figure out what keywords you're advertising for.

numnum

11:59 pm on Oct 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Okay, it looks like I thought Blekko might have discontinued its Adsense "spy" feature because I removed Adsense from one of my sites a few months ago and Blekko has crawled that site since then -- and therefore no Adsense link appears among the pulldown menu items for that URL. But when I enter /adsense=myadsensepubid in the search bar, all my sites pop up, including the one from which I removed Adsense. And of course Google facilitates all this by allowing only one Adsense account per publisher. I feel violated.

So who else in particular (besides Blekko) provides this wonderful tool for anyone to exploit with impunity at the expense of Adsense publishers?

netmeg

2:41 pm on Oct 5, 2011 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



That's one of the reasons I keep all my sites out of Blekko. That and the fact that they ban all sites using 'noarchive' as spammers.

I mean, who uses Blekko anyway?