Blocking specific AdSense advertisers from your site

/ Saturday, March 26, 2011 /
You can stop ads from specific AdSense advertisers from appearing on your blog - provided you know the URL that those advertisers are using.

Why block individual advertisers

No Spam Barnstar Hires
Previously, I've described how to set up AdSense on your blog, and how to to block certain categories of AdSense ads from your blog.

But there may be times when you need more control than this, for example if your blog (or other website) has:

Poor contextual advertising fit:
AdSense is a "contextual" advertising programme:  it decides what ads to show to a person on a web-page based on the content of the page and the characteristics of the person viewing it.

But the contents in some blogs attract advertisers with directly opposite points of view.   For example, an anti-hunt blog will have posts about the things that hunters do to animals and why these are bad - but the contextual-advertising approach will probably attract ads from people promoting hunting or selling hunting equipment.

And other blogs just attract straight-out completitors:  I've advised one person in the blogger help-forum who was running a blog about a particular educational scholarship and was very unhappy that their blog was showing ads for other scholarships.

Restrictions imposed by other advertisers:
One of my blogs has affiliate ads from a particular budget-accommodation travel site.  One of their terms and conditions is that I don't display ads for a list of other websites that they provided.

Advertisers not categorised correctly:
Even if you've applied category-filtering to your blog, there may be some advertisers that sneak into the wrong category - for example, an advertisement for diet products that uses pictures that are only slightly suggestive may be listed in the "Weight loss" category, but not the "References to Sex & Sexuality" category.

If you advertise your blog through AdWords:
Sometimes, AdWords can be an effective tool for advertising your own blog.   But  in terms of keywords, your blog is likely to be a very good fix.   So there's a high chance that your ads will be shown on your blog, unless you tell AdSense not to.


How to block specific companies:


In any of these cases - and others - you may want to tell AdSense not to show ads from certain advertisers on your blog.   Unfortunately, you cannot quite do this - AdSense doesn't let you identify individual advertisers.   But you can block ads that point to specific websites:

Follow these steps:

Log in to AdSense,


In the "old" AdSense interface  (the main one as at March 2011):


2  Choose the AdSense Setup tab

3  Choose the  Competitive ad filter  sub-tab

4  Choose the AdSense for Content sub-sub-tab (the tab-row is half way down the page, underneath the examples)

5  Add the web-sites whose ads you want to block to the list:
  • In most cases, enter the website name with out the "www".  Eg   enter rustling.org, not www.rusting.org, to block ALL adds from the site.
  • If you need finer control than this (eg blocking ads for a forum at a site, but not the site itself) study the examples shown on the page to understand what to enter.

In the new AdSense interface (still in beta testing at March 2011):


2  Choose the Allow & block ads tab (from the top row)

3  Under Blocking Options (left hand menu), choose Advertiser URLs

4  Click the Block new URLs button.    This opens a window


5  From the Products drop-down, choose one or more products and press Apply (currently at the bottom right corner of the drop-down window).
  • f you just want to keep the ads off your blog, choose the "Content" product.  Or to be certain, choose all of them.

6  Enter the names (URLs) of the sites you want to block
  • Click Learn how to format your URLs for blocking fordetails about how to enter URLs so that you block sites at the correct level.   But in most cases, you just enter the top-level name, eg enter "blogger.com" to stop all ads pointing to anywhere under www.blogger.com
7  Choose one of the reasons.

8  Press Block Sites.

The newly-blocked site will appear in your list of blocked URLs - which is in alphabetical order.

You can un-block it at any time by going to the same screen, finding it in the list, and clicking the Unblock link at the right hand side of the name/product.


What your visitors will see:

Within a short time (maybe even in about 10 minutes), advertisements that point to the URL(s) you entered will not be displayed on your site:  instead, visitors who see AdSense adverts will see other (non-blocked) ads, or Google (public service) ads if no payng ads are available.

Notice the risk for you:- if you block too many potential advertisers, your site may only show public-service or Google ads that don't earn you revenue.


Final thoughts:

Ads which you block because they feel "spammy" can easilyre-appear from other not-yet-blocked sites:  folks who make money off them move servers etc regularly.  if you are  determined to keep certain ads off your site, you may need to keep figuring out where the ads are coming from and adding new sites to your blocked-list all the time.

Finding out what sites to block can be challenging, as not every advertiser puts their URL into their graphical ads.    Some ways of doing this include:
  • Looking very hard at the advertisement: 
    Sometimes the company URL is in small text at the bottom
  • Searching for a key phrase from the ad 
    Eg when I wrote this articl,e Blogger-HAT's home page was showing an ad for "Smallest hidden DV in the world" - I suspect I could identify them with Google fairly quickly).
  • Click the ad yourself:  Remember that this is against AdSense's terms and conditions, and that you won't get any revenue for it.   I'm not suggesting that it's good to do this - AdSense know that it occasionally happens by accident, so they are unlikely to penalise you for doing, so long as you don't do it often.
  • Click the same ad on someone else's site:
    This is allowed under AdSense's rules.   But it's not recommended, because the advertiser won't get any benefit from the click, so doing this will tend to put the price they are willing to pay for each down in the longer-term.


Related Articles: 



Settng up AdSense on your blog

Blocking categories of AdSense ads

AdSense and AdWords

Putting a custom-search-engine in your blog

Other advertising programmes for your blog

Blogger and Firefox 4

/ /
A list of issues and observiations about using Blogger with Firefox 4 (released in March 2011).



What's this all about?

Firefox 4 is now released.   I'm usually slow to take upgrades - I'd rather let other people find and fix any problems first.  But I had issues with 3.6, so decided to try it.

This post is a list of what I've observed: hopefully it will help to other Blogger users who are thinking about upgrading.

It's early days, I only upgraded last night, so it's possible that I'll find a problem that's so bad that I need to downgrade again.   This list isn't complete - I'll be updating it as I go along.   If you'd like to add anything to add, please leave a comment.


What I've noticed, or seen other people mention:

  • Everything in Blogger looks a bit sharper.    (This is fine for me - must remember that some of my visitors won't see things that way.)
  • The solution I'd found to make a table with fixed header and scroll bars on the body of Rustling.org isn't working any more   (definitely need to find a better one)
  • Once I've clicked the Facebook "recommend" link on a page, it just goes grey, but doesn't show the number of people who've recommended it.
  • Other people have posted about issues with the order that uploaded pictures are displayed in.   (keeping this in mind, it may not turn out to be an issue for me though).
  • Editing Google custom maps:  in FF4, it's not possible to change the order of the items in the left-hand map key by drag-and-dropping them:  this was possible in FF3.6, and does working in IE8.x.   (Not strictly Blogger-related, but I'm using Google Maps heavily for one of my sites).

AdSense and the "Request-URI Too Large" error message: sometimes a work-around is good enough.

/ Friday, March 4, 2011 /
This article is about an error message that I sometimes see when logging into AdSense - and a way of thinking about browser problems that you might have with Blogger.


What happens:

Every so often, when I'm logging in to AdSense, I get a screen like this



The error message is,
"Request-URI Too Large
The requested URL /accounts/SetSID... is too large to process."

And the window title is "414 Request-URI Too Large "

It doesn't happen every time, or even most times, and I cannot spot any trends (eg only when I first open the browser, only when I have seven tabs open, etc) - except perhaps that I've only seen it in Firefox.  But Firefox is the browser I mainly use, so it may be coincidence.


My problem, or Google's?

I've searched for the error message:  most of the results were for descriptions of cases when it happened every time someone tried to log in to a system.  It appears there was even a case, a while ago, when this happened for Gmail in some situations.   But this isn't my scenario, though, because it doesn't happen all the time.

There are suggestions that it may be related to browser cookies settings.   I'm sure that is true, sometimes.  But it's not 100% true for me:  I can get the message once, try again immediately and not get it the next time - and there's no way I changed my cookie settings in between.


What to do about it:

I've found a very simple solution:   open another tab, and go to AdSense again.    Every time (so far ;-) ) AdSense has loaded correctly on the 2nd try.

If this didn't work, the next things I'd try would be (in roughly this order):
  • Clearing the cache and re-starting my browser
  • Trying to get into AdSense from a different browser
  • Restarting my computer
  • Checking that I was using the most-recent releases version of the browser (NB  this is the supported, released version - not a Beta version that's being tested).

Why I'm posting this:

If you use Blogger or other Google products - or indeed any other internet-based publishing products - a lot, it's likely that you will run into situations like this.

Most probably, the underlying problem will be a bug in the software, or some subtle combination of security settings in your computer and/or browser software.

Tracking down what's happening can be difficult and time-consuming, and involve learning a lot about topics that you don't otherwise need to know.   And knowing what's causing the problem doesn't always help:   If  only a few people are having the same problem, so Google probably won't be keen to fix it, even if something in their software caused the issue.

The key message of this post is that when you have a problem with Blogger (etc) doing strange things, you should firstly look for a good-enough way to work around the problem.

If you can't find a work-around  (ie if nothing works, or if the time or effort required are too big for you to put up with), then you should look for a solution.   The first step is always to see if other people are having the same problem - to do this you could either do a google-search for the error message, or post a question somewhere like the Blogger Help Forum.

And IMHO, you should only start in-depth investigation PC and browser security sessions if all else fails - or if the time/effort required to get around the original issue is greater than the time and effort needed to search for a solution.


Related Articles: 



Chitika - another type of advertising for your blog

Setting up AdSense on your blog

Giving your blog subscribers a free e-book

Getting image-only AdSense ads for your blog

Putting a gadget above your blog's header

Adding the "find us on Facebook" plug-in to your blog

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