I was working on my websites and noticed the SEO Quake icon that I have in the bottom of my browser window, it has been a long time since I ran through the sites with SEO Quake, and I was curious about how one of the sites I am working on is doing, so I engaged the program. I found it interesting to see a link for AdsSpy appear above the AdSense advertisement at the top of the page indicating how many other sites run advertisements for that AdSense ID. Now, you know me, I’m the one that runs a site dedicated to protecting privacy online, so my first thought was to wonder just what information shows up about the sites. More than I like, that’s for sure.
The SEO Quake team blog has a listing that shows what the report from AdsSpy looks like in their post New handy service – AdsSpy.com. From that screen cap you can see that AdsSpy provides the AdSense ID and a list of all domain names that are running that AdSense ID number.
Now, their explanation for what makes this a handy thing is:
How does it help?
1. Identify MFA-networks, and ban them in your adwords account.
2. Uncover the secrets of successful webmasters, and learn some tips and tricks based on years of practical experience.
3. Check your own site and see if there is only your adsense code or you’ve been hacked.
4. You can find stolen content or wordpress themes.
But let’s take a closer look at that. I can see being able to identify MFA-networks (don’t feel bad if you didn’t catch that one, I had to go visit Wikipedia to find out MFA means Made For AdSense). What I have to wonder is are the MFA-Networks identified because of the number of sites they have, or the fact that the sites are all duplicate content sites? I run 20+ websites and 30+ blogs, many have AdSense in one form or another on them. Is someone going to look at my stats and tag me as being shut out of the sites that can show their ads simply because I have X number of sites listed as having my AdSense ID on them? Or are they going to look at the sites and see that I have a site on travel, a site on Alaskan cooking, a site on being a family caregiver, a site for fantasy writers, a site for my novel in progress, and so on and that all of them are unique sites with unique content showing differing AdSense advertising?
It may seem like I am being overly worried about one advertiser deciding to lock me out, but I know that advertisers work in mass marketing. A single person might run AdWords for 200 different companies, one of those may target say travel. Now, if that person visits my travel blog and sees I have X number of sites running my AdSense code, and they decide to block me assuming that I have X number of sites that would show travel ads. That cheats me out of having any of their other 199 advertisers ads appearing on my sites. It also cheats them, because I only have one site that shows advertising on travel, unless they are targeting travel to Alaska, then I have four sites on Alaska and one travel site. I’ve lost out on 200 possible ads for my sites, and the advertiser has blocked me because of a misconception. What if they had another advertiser that wants to target family caregivers? Or one that wants to target people that want to travel to Alaska?
That’s not fair to either of us. I don’t run AdWords, but I am willing to bet that Google has a method already for AdWords users to see how often their ads show up on specific AdSense IDs, so I see no reason why AdsSpy needs to show the pages that AdSense appears on. I have a reason why I don’t like that, however, and will get to that in a few minutes.
First, lets look at reason two for why AdsSpy is recommended:
“2. Uncover the secrets of successful webmasters….” Okay, this one sounds good to me, but I would have to see more than I have about AdsSpy to know just how it works, unless the secret is seeing how many sites they run ads on. Even then, how can you know how much they are making from the sites that they have AdSense on? I know nothing about how you are supposed to uncover these secrets, so I’ll move on to reason three…
“3. Check your own site and see if there is only your AdSense code or you’ve been hacked.” Yes! This is a very useful one, I’ve seen a lot of complaints before about people that have cracked into sites and inserted their own AdSense code into a popular website to filter off revenue. Unfortunately I can not assert just how well this works, since I have little experience with AdsSpy at the moment, but it does sound like a good feature to me. I don’t, however, see how it helps to find out if one site has been cracked to see all the sites that are running the AdSense code. Needs more investigation, so lets move on and see what that fourth reason was again -
“4. You can find stolen content or wordpress themes” I’m not sure about finding stolen content, do scrappers steal the AdSense code as well? I would assume that anyone that steals a WordPress theme is going to change the code in the AdSense so they get the revenue, not the person they stole it from, but who knows. It sounds like a good deal, so I’ll not get too into analyzing it when I don’t have all the facts.
Now, how about the reason why I shy away from AdsSpy? Privacy. I’m not so sure I like having someone going around scrapping my AdSense code off all the sites where I have it and sharing all my sites in an easy to cross-reference link. I have a site dedicated to stopping Identity Theft and while I have AdSense ads on it, I do not have my personal information on it. I *DO* have my personal information on other sites that I have, and in my opinion it leads to a breech of my personal information to link those sites together – particularly when I pay for a subscription to WhoIs Guard to have my identity hidden on my identity protection site. They are, in effect, making my paying for WhoIs Guard all but useless. Yes, I understand that if I was really concerned about it I would not run AdSense on the site, however, I have to have some way to be able to afford to keep the site going, so I use AdSense and other advertising means to try and offset the cost. AdsSpy is spying on my ads and telling anyone that wants to pay $5 to find out who it is that runs the site. And with that information the person can look up my address on my other sites using WhoIs, thereby placing my identity at risk. A risk I had not even known was there until, on a whim this afternoon, I enabled SEO Quake to see what the Page Rank of one of my sites is.
And that is not the only site I prefer not to have my personal information tracked through to. I have one that discusses my religious beliefs, something that is very personal and private. What I want to believe is between me and God, not between me, God and whoever wants to pay AdSpy $5 to show them who that AdSense code belongs to. I set that site behind WhoIs Guard for a reason, to separate my work (advertising) from my spiritual beliefs. Now my payment for WhoIs Guard is useless because AdsSpy has infiltrated my AdSense code and linked my site to my other sites so people can locate all of my sites. That is a breech of my personal information and my security.
I can think of a lot of other reasons why I dislike the notion of AdsSpy, but I can also see where it is a useful tool, I just think that it needs a bit more work before it is going to be the tool it has the potential to be, and I think that it should have some kind of safeguards in place for people like me, that have multiple sites and want to have their personal information kept off of some of those sites. Maybe they could have it cross reference WhoIs Guard and see if the site has a guard on it, removing those with WhoIs Guard from the list of sites that are linked to. They can keep the number of sites, but I think they should not display every one of them, particularly the ones that have been set behind WhoIs Guard.
I also think that I need to look more into the service, and I’ll let you all know when I get a chance to what I think of it, for now, I am going to hold back my final opinion on AdsSpy since it is still in Beta. We all know that stuff in Beta is far from the finished product, it has bugs that will need to be worked out and details to be ironed and maybe a few goodies that will be added.
Right now, you know you want to, go on, go see what my sites are. AdsSpy has found 4 of them so far.
