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Can adding worldwide Nginx reverse proxies negatively affect AdSense ?

adrianTNT

2:43 pm on Jan 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

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My CPC is all over the place, site average used to be $0.15, last weeks was $0.05 and earnings keep rolling back when I refresh the adsense stats, recently made just ~$5 per day, today I had $12 just few hours when day started (and with ~0.80 cpc = not average).

I am thinking, one recent change was adding a nginx caching/reverse proxy in US (used to be just France), then I added another one in Singapore, now site is served from 3 locations and shows 3 different IPs based on client location.
It should just make the site faster, increase engagement, decrease bounce rates.

Are there any reason why these might affect AdSense ? Maybe it is seen as fraudulent because of engagement increase in US ?
I am thinking some things like PageSpeed has these background triggers (I think they are called beacons), maybe these reach AdSense urls in background and is identified as fraudulent activity ?

I also had an URL misidentified as adult content a few days ago, eider adsense automatically did something wrong, or someone reported a clean URL.

Any tips / thoughts ? :/

lammert

7:26 pm on Jan 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Using a CDN to deliver content to visitors from the nearest point is done by many sites and increases user experience. Your three proxy setup is a private CDN implementation. That should be positive in Google's view, not negative. Are you sure you didn't make any configuration errors where different content is served through the three reverse proxies? One situation I can think of is where a visitor from Europe or Asia is seeing one type of content, while the AdSense bot visiting from the US sees something different.

You might want to see in the log files which of the three proxies is hit (most) by the AdSense bot.

levo

8:28 pm on Jan 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

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The first thing to do is dive deep in your Analytics reports. Try to pinpoint the browser (and version), the networks, the page url, and the country of clawbacks. You need to take screenshots of your Adsense reports in Google Analytics and compare them once clawbacks occur.

Some click attacks come from specific networks/subnets (you can check via Analytics > Audience > Technology > Network > Adsense tab), and some use same browser version.

If you can't find any suspicious activity, you might also want to check your overall page design: if ads are too close to clickable elements, do menus etc. cover ads.

adrianTNT

9:03 pm on Jan 15, 2020 (gmt 0)

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OK, so I will check apache logs to see if I can see activity of the adsense bot in all my cache servers (Us, Singapore, Fr), maybe I see something wrong there.

@levo now that you mentioned it, I am sure I seen suspicious activity many months before, might be up to a year, I blocked them then but I didn't get back to see if they returned, because ... I was 90% sure that was a bounce rate attack (I beilive[d] these are real) so they signal to google that user didn't find on my site what they searched for;
What I seen was: traffic from US would come from Google and 99% of them would be shown as bounced off the site (just one page view), many ips, all US, and all same user agent and browser resolution. Now that you mentioned it, I think these were click bots, I will look into that. I had screens, the activity was obvious out of normality.

adrianTNT

3:16 am on Jan 17, 2020 (gmt 0)

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I looked at AdSense stats in Analytics, (I am getting lost, I find Analytics too advanced), anyway ...

Last 30 days, the 3rd network by AdSense revenue is Digital Ocean, this doesn't look right no ?! Because they must be bots, or should I consider the popularity of VPNs these days ? Should I try to block them ?

It is 3rd by revenue, but it is not much, just ~$8 in last 30 days, because there are many networks, 75% are "other networks", so many small ones.

levo

4:35 am on Jan 18, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Try to dig little more deeper. Select Digital Ocean in the report, and then select 'Browser Version' as Secondary dimension from the dropdown menu. If you see only a single version, or an older version of Chrome for example, they might be bots. You can also check the bounce rate from that network.

Once you decide to ban a network, note the 'browser version' and 'page' data from that network (secondary dimensions) and try to find the IP address(es) from your apache logs.

adrianTNT

4:23 pm on Feb 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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@Levo, they were bots, but even after blocking them, AdSense decrease seems to be related to something else.

My ad coverage decreased little by little and looking back at the starts, it looks like it started decreasing when I enabled cloudflare (but not as much), then when enabling a "cache all" in cloudflare, the ad coverage reduced to almost the half.

Currnetly (without CloudFlare) I had this cache setup in PHP when printing the html page:

$cache_seconds = 60*30;
header("Expires: ".gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T', time()+$cache_seconds));
header("Cache-Control:public, max-age=".$cache_seconds);

Now I am almost certain that a cached html page will not properly record the ad view / click, is it bad to cache html pages too ?
I know the ad code is at google's end (people always jump to answer that), but when a html page is served from user's browser, I think ad-sense might be affected.
Any thoughts ? Anyone wants to try html caching on their site to look at ad coverage effect ? :D