When Google Adsense ads show up on unauthorized sites

Posted by Felix Okoli on Tuesday July 14, 2015 at 13:36:50:

At times Adsense publishers may notice a report in their account from Google stating that some ads were showing up on sites they have not authorized to show them. What does a publisher do when he experiences such a situation? Well, he can either choose to continue like that or choose to authorize them. If he choose the latter, chances are that his adsense income will increase but it could put his account at greater risk on those sites he doesn't control and if he chooses to continue not authorizing them, he earns less income but reduces the risk of getting penalized by the actions of third party sites.

Google adsense really has a great feature that allows publishers to choose which sites they want to show their ads and which ones they don't. They can access this feature by going to Settings > Access and authorization > Site authorization. If you have more than one content website, adding your ads to all those sites as long as they have traffic would ultimately increase your income and it's normally recommended as long as you have full control of those network of sites. If you however don't own ownership to a site and the owner may be displaying your adsense ads on the site, you can choose to either authorize it or not authorize it. Authorizing it puts your adsense account at greater risk for sites you don't full control and I wouldn't personally recommend it.

There are probably several reasons why your adsense ads may be showing up on some unauthorized sites and some of them includes; sites copying your content, websites offering you free hosting, websites using the same adsense code you are using and so on.,

I read a discussion on this issue on an online forum about some publishers experiencing the same thing after enabling the whitelist option. Some bloggers were even using Google's free blogging service on bloger.com and some were using other sites like hubpages.com and wordpress.com. Well, I have to say that if you are using a free web hosting service like blogger.com, you shouldn't be complaining that blogger.com shows up in the list of unauthorized sites displaying your adsense codes since you ought to have included it even if you were using a sub domain name or full domain name for a site hosted on blogger.com. Same also if you were using a sub domain on hubpages.com or wordpress.com. So, you should enable the url of sites that your content website is hosted on so you don't loose valuable clicks since those sites are already trusted as they host your own website.

Ofcourse, no adsense publisher wants his ads to be used on porn sites, video sharing site or hacking sites since those are designed to kill your adsense account and so it's normally a good idea to enable the allowed sites option. You should however include sites that are considered safe and have a relationship with your site.