Hi, I recently purchased a WordPress blog (www.axess.org) about a month ago. It's using the free Flexibility theme, but I just realized that the site is showing ads that are not associated with my AdSense account, it seems those ads belong to ca-pub-6816389622535224 and ca-pub-5149869439810473. My questions are: Is this caused by some plug-ins, or is this something embedded when I purchased the website? How can I remove them? Do I have to mannually edit all those PHP scripts? Please help, I'm kind of new to all this, but I do feel it's kind of wrong if someone did this intentionally. Or, is it just someone hacked into my account and did this? Thanks for any help I could get!
Have you looked in the theme options for a way to change those ads? If the ads still appear when you turn off the plugins then they are somewhere in the template files. You don't have to edit all of the template files because it's usually a simple thing to fix. I looked through the original theme and found nothing, but they could be in the encoded functions.php file. I have tried several decoding methods and still can't break that file. Yes, it's possible that the ads were added by the previous owner or even by a hacker.
Thanks for your opinion. I would think a popular theme like flexibility shouldn't have any adsense embedded. I currently have 17 plug-ins activated. I tried to deactivate all of them at one, and that got rid off 2 out 3 'malicious' adsense blocks, but when I tried to deactivate them one by one, the ads still remained. I'm just kind of frustrated to work on promoting my blog while realizing someone else is taking advantage of it without my permission. Can I report to Google Adsense? Btw, the theme's function.php was encoded, I have no clue how to check the content of that file. Thanks and any other input will be highly appreciated!
Report the Ads to Google . It sounds like the theme might have been build to accept this type of exploits or you simply got injected whit malicious code
If you purchased a blog then it's likely these adsense blocks are from a previous owner. Having said that, sometimes 'free themes' aren't quite as free as you think and they have adsense embedded in them and sometimes 'free plugins' aren't quite so free either as they have adsense embedded in them (part of the terms of use for the plugin will tell you that's what's happening). More rarely, it will be due to a hack but tbh, stuffing adsense into a site using hacking seems like a complete waste of time since the account is likely to get zapped before payout.
It may not even be any of those. It may just be simply the previous websites owner has left the adsense on there, just edit your theme files and find the adsense code, by viewing your page source i can see the adsense code, i would think the code was located on the index.php file, just have a look there and remove the code.