The google adsense publisher ID is visible in plain text on the source code of pages, this can easily be abused by anyone with malicious intents: for example by putting a victim's publisher ID on a page that violates google's TOS, thus endangering your adsense account. I wrote to adsense support about this, here's the response I received: I replied to this email, inquiring if I could encrypt the adsense code so that it wouldn't be visible in plain text, and whether encrypting the adsense code would violate their TOS. The response to my second email: Opinions?
that is correct, its possible that some one could steal your codes and try to affect your adsense, but sending google log files and proper details would solve the issue, also hopefully in future google shd encrypt the code themselves so this issue never comes up, so if there is 2 options encrypted code + publisher id for revenue sharing sites, it would do a lot good to the publishers community
I agree 100%, but according to adsense support they do not allow publishers to alter the source code for any reason
they wont coz it mite just not let them track the page with adsense content with code modifications, so would lead to tos issues, and u really have no other option, cant go against their tos, need to respect those, and its their responsiblity to manage these things, sooner or later they will come with updates, coz they might be having like a million publishers, they think more then us
I had this once. AdSense system emailed be that one of my pages had "offensive language". They attached the URL and it wasn't one of my sites - someone stole code. I replied to Google that I had no idea who this site belongs to and they replied that I wouldn't need to worry and no need for further actions. Ads just stopped appearing on that site (either owner took them off or AdSense blocked). So, if that happens - they'll notify you. Just reply to them to be safe.
Well this could happen if someone looks at your site, do a view source, copy your template then in the haste, forget to change the code from yours to theirs. what do you think?
i completely agree, displaying id in the open is bad and bad people can abuse it. but from other side its not easy to hide, though they should def think of some kind of encryption for it
I have brought up the same question before here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=122300&highlight=trouble
i suggest that a publisher account can only be shown on websites by users, specifically by registering the website url per publisher account. Validation of owner can be patterned through sitemaps validation
Why don't you disable the view source option on your adsense sites. This will help not to open the source for a human visitor, search engines will read pages normal and adsense also will work normal. I think saving the page can reveal the code. Better is to monitor the adsense and report google when sense something wrong.
That's soothing to hear. This risk is entirely avoidable though, & I think google should allow publishers to encrypt the adsense code if not provide an option to encrypt it in the adsense setup area itself. Quoted from adsense support's email reply: How?
You can use javascript to disable right clicking, but that doesn't necessarily prevent people from viewing your source code.
What does right clicking have to do with copying the publisher ID? It's not visible on the page anyway but in the source code.
if publishers can link their AdSense sites with their AdSense account I think it would solvethe problem. Then Google will know it is not your site that is violating the TOS.
how will that stop someone whos determined to mess u up? anyways this will annoy regular users to the max
The only problem with no right click is your computer stores a cache of the webpage in the tmp files on your system and you can then go and view the source code freely.. Google needs to encrypt, simple as that....