Hiding google_ad_client, is it possible?

As per the title I'm wondering if it's possible to hide the ad_client part of your adsense code to your visitors but still keep it visible to google media partners and still keep within the TOS.
I ask this after looking at this guy's obvious cheating (earlier post on this from someone else) here. It's an assumption that the site owner is using his own client code but what's to stop a competitor (are there adsense competitors) from placing YOUR ad_client code into a site like this? The odds are you'd wake up the next morning with no adsense account and most likely goog wouldn't give any further info as to how it happened. What can be done to prevent something like this from happening? Any ideas?

 

Interesting question... Tons of scripts and services work in the same manner - and I always wondered whats stopping from someone abusing it... and tormenting an account holder.

The question is... can we hide it. NOPE! Client-side code is just that. Its client-side code. Even with a plethora of includes, and some encapulation - the code is still sitting in the viewers temp files waiting to be viewed.

The only way to prevent this... is via a server-side solution. Similiar to coop.

I guess the best prevention is... close monitorring. Catch the issue before Google does.

Best wishes.
>rt

 

Nice response btw, and as I suspected really. Would you happen to know a way of monitoring this then? Is it possible to see which sites your code is on (beyond the obvious search for your pub id)? From my point of view there isn't really and odds are google would never share that unless your site is a high earner.

 

I don't think you'd be very successful searching for your pubCode because G doesn't deliver ads when the page is being requested by a robot like YahooSlurp or GoogleBot. So the code would never be displayed and never indexed.

The only way I can think of would be to ensure that all your ads use a channel. Then if you look at your report and there are impressions that are not in a channel, bingo you could alert Google. This would work if your really diligent in making sure all your ads have a channel otherwise you might waste G with false positives.

 

Very good idea, going to do that now. Thanks!

 

Doing a quick search in google (a bit unrelated) found this site annewalshcoachDOTcom
Nice title there lol.