I recently had issues with my web hosting provider. It wasn't the first time I dealt with the customer support staff and I seriously doubt it will be the last. Over the course of several support requests (over a period of months), I noticed some things that should be taught to customer support staff concerning customer service, but apparently isn't: How to properly respond to customers.
Before I tell you how to reduce AdSense impressions while improving the click-through rate (CTR) at the same time, I have to admit I dropped the ball on this one. Back in July, I published "Reducing AdSense Impressions from Robots", and then later inserted an update message saying I wasn't doing it that way. I meant to do a follow-up after testing, but I got sidetracked by real-world events.
These techniques require you to insert code which will set a condition. A condition of 0 will allow an AdSense block to be displayed while a condition of 1 will prevent it.
As a website owner, you should be worried when someone scrapes all or part of the content of one of your pages. If you're not familiar with it, the Copyscape service is one way to find them and start the elimination process. There is a procedure, which you can do for free (Copyscape charges for more than 10 searches per month) over and over again, that will never cost you anything.
A couple of days ago, I logged into my Google AdSense account and added my domains into the textarea box for "Allowed Sites". I was seeing too many impressions versus clicks and couldn't figure out why.
It seems everyone has their favorite analytics program or analytics service. After testing and using many of the most popular services, standalone programs and WordPress plugins, my favorite real time analytics program is Mint. The service that comes in second for me is Google Analytics because data retrieval is delayed.
(Update: On second thought, never mind. AVG has seen the error of their ways and the other code simply keeps logs from showing the Live Search referrer data. I'm blocking the log data a different way now. Another update will be in a later post with a similar title.)
I've spent the last umpteen hours scouring the Internet for this information. There are two robot sources using JavaScript robots and causing extra AdSense impressions. They had to be terminated.
Here are the .htaccess rules that can stop them both:
