A featured WebmasterWorld thread is titled "Shocked to See Many Sites Using My Adsense Code." It is a common story, you have a popular site with Google AdSense ads on them. There are many people out there that copy your site and put it on their own spammy sites. They not only copy your content, but copy your AdSense code.
Great! You get money for people stealing your content! Not so fast! Yes, you may get some incremental income from those who stole your content, but it may also lead to Google thinking that site is owned by you and ultimately get you banned from AdSense due to violating their spam guidelines.
Seems ridiculous? Perhaps, but it is not unheard of. Some have thought that this is why DigitalPoint was banned from AdSense until someone at Google took a closer look.
Heck, even Brett Tabke, the founder of WebmasterWorld, said:
That is a classic AdSense attack. Someone is trying to get you kicked out of AdSense by linking you to a bad neighborhood.Getting a site listed on a block list such as repetitive email spammer, malware host, or phising host will get a hand check on that site 100% of that time if it is in the AdSense program.
People specifically try to get sites banned from using AdSense over this type of spam attack. It works and it is hard for both the publisher and Google to stay on top of.
Yes, AdSense built an allowed sites feature, but I never use it. I don't care to spend my time allowing each site manually. Plus, this feature was added as an afterthought years after AdSense went live. Honestly, I am not sure why it was ever set up this way. Allowed sites should have been the method originally.
You sign up, you add a site/application to the list of sites allowed to show ads and you stick generic ad code on the site. Google then determines who the ad income goes to based on the site or application showing the ad. Yes, this would kill revenue sharing forums and sites as they are set up now, but there are other ways to set that up.
As a publisher, I don't and I won't spend my time looking for sites trying to hurt me. I will spend time trying to build relevant, useful content that helps my audience and I enjoy writing.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
