There is a thread at the Google AdSense Help forums have recent complaints about third-party sites drastically inflating their earnings reports, showing massive spikes in ad impressions on sites they do not control.
This results in the RPM (revenue per impression) dropping and makes AdSense publisher freak that Google might think their site/ad placements are bad. Which might result in Google thinking their earnings per click should go lower because they generate low quality impressions for their ads.
Here is a screen shot of one of the reports from a publisher showing fake data from boxofficemojo.com. That site has said they don't even serve ads with AdSense, so they can't remove anything. Some think there is this hack going around where this traffic is being spoofed to AdSense?
One user wrote:
I spoke a developer who has a lot of hacking knowledge. What he believes is happening is someone is using a script that is pinging the Adsense servers using various publisher IDs and spoofing these domains as the callback. Not sure what the purpose is, but I've spoken to a dozen publishers who are having the same issue. It's almost like referral spam, but using Top Sites on your Adsense account and mixing in legit sites with those that are spam based.
Google is supposedly aware of this issue, says one Google AdSense Top Contributor. He wrote:
Yes Adsense is aware of the issue because of your posts. However going by the number of post & threads in this forum plus the number of views on this thread personally I doubt if it's thousands of publisher ids but that's mere speculation on my part based on the amount of "noise" about the issue.Who knows the reason that's behind the why of someone doing it but this wouldn't be the 1st time of strange activity for some publishers that on the surface there isn't an obvious in your face logic to it but unfortunately it probably won't be the last either. Over the last few years I've personally seen my fair share but haven't seen this one.
Do you have this issue?
Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help & WebmasterWorld.
