You competitors can see you're using the ad network!

Best thing I loved about the ad network what that my competitors couldn't see how I was winning.

Now I'm worried.

Looking in my source code I see

<a href="http://www.example.com/">A advert here</a> 
<img src="http://ads.digitalpoint.com/t-27004-27319-25745-5203-20438.gif" width="1" height="1">

Code (markup):

This is obviously for the ad impression tracking.

Personally I'd prefer it to be a little more under the radar, could it not use a non generic domain for the tracking?

http://ads.somegenericdomainthathasnothingonit.com ?

 

If your competitor can right-click to find that, they are probably able to resolve that obscured domain to DP anyway with a whois lookup.

 

Sure but it's a little more under the radar.

Anyway there is also more potential for google to mass find and ban sites using digitalpoint.

 

I don't get this part, if they wanted to do a ban via the image link, surely they could do that no matter what domain it pointed to.

They would just sign up and get the current image being used and there you go.

Anyways, there are plenty of other ways they could do it if they wanted to.

 

Of course, but as I say, just keeping it "under the radar" a lot more and making it look more natural.

Surely everyone is more for keeping things looking more organic?

 

How many of us care about stats ? If there a way to enable / disable stats maybe ?

 

I have CJ links with tracking images. I'm not expecting to get banned because of those links anywhere soon. Same with Co-op. The more it involves into a fully fledged ad network the better.

 

I still think there needs to definitely be a way to disable this. It could be fatal.

 

Disabling stats (if it were to be offered) would not mean you could remove the 1 pixel spacer used for tracking. That is used to gather stats for those of us who are interested.

I think you are kinf of riding both sides of the fence. You want it to be accepted as a true ad network yet you want to remove tracking in order to "fly under the radar".

I think the tracking info is important to an ad network and when combined with category and languge options (we have well over 10,000 accounts now), it will solidify it

 

Why do you think this?

 

I agree totally - the tracking image does make it rather easy for the seach engines to penalize all Co-op sites if they so choose. It was relatively undetectable before.

As the ads are fetched from the DP ad-server each time anyway, it seems there could be a more subtle way to gather the stats information without requiring this image to be loaded by the end-users browser. If the stats are only showing number of impressions and not giving any additional information about the visitor, why does it need to be loaded by the end-user as opposed to just by the server showing the ad ?

 

Let me say something right now..Shawn has never shown an interest for "flying under the radar" so if anything, there will be more tracking capabilities added, not less.

Why all this fear? You are a bit naive if you think Google does not know about the Ad Network and somehow removing tracking protects you from them.

 

Fine have the tracking, but for me im more worried about my competitors working my 'secret' out. A generic domain would combat this. Do you want your competitors seeing that you're using DP?

 

Yes, that way my link will be advertised on more pages and I will have a chance of getting more visitors.

Stop all this stupid paranoia, we are sick of it.

 

Wrong because it's cached first. Stats would be pretty useless if it weren't tracked on-site at output time.

Yfs1 sums it up nicely. There's nothing to worry about.

 

You're missing my point and getting off topic.

I'm more scared of my competitors finding out. How many people here would be willing to phone up their competitors and say "hey I'm using the coop ad network, and it works for my site"?

How many of you would tell your competitors where you buy your stock? Or how much of a discount you've secured? etc

 

Well I am not going to send an email proclaiming it to them but there is no way to stop them if they set their mind to figuring out why all of a sudden you have 20,000 links.

Changing that one domain name as T0PS has pointed out won't stop a dedicated researcher.

I personally use a ton of different SEO methods, some visible some maybe not so because I don't rely solely on the Coop Network, it has never been a concern of mine

 

You're running the script on your own acct/server.
It's your site. If you don't want the gifs present in the ads then just remove/comment out the code that does it. If you're worried about honouring the stats side of things globally (as in conveying accurate data) then pass the appropriate HEAD request to the adserver for the gif via your own code (back-end). It's not an overly difficult thing to do, and I'm sure someone could whip something up. Any data that's going back to the adserver with the request can be passed in this way (except the ip).

Sounds complex, but quite straight forward.. truth be told, I'm surprised a 'silent' mode wasn't included as an option.

Cheers,

JL

 

Sure but lets not put it right under their noses, right?

Shawn has consistantly said this ad network is the users network, not his.

I was just interested to see what the opinions where....

Surely just in changing that one url it keeps everyone happy? Are there not any other tracking methods? I respect your opinion, you're not worried. Some of us feel differently.

 

I don't think Shawn would allow people to go around messing with the code like this