Using Competitive Ad Filter in AdSense

By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News Network
Monday, November 14, 2005

Lets talk about when to use AdSense - Competitive Ad Filter. It is very rarely used to block competitors. However you can use it to provide a better viewing experience to your site’s visitors.

I noticed that there are hordes of directory sites which bid for low paying keywords on a subject and direct people to their sites. Their sites are pretty barren of useful information and often auto-generated. Yes they too use AdSense but that is beside the point.

I don’t know about you but I don’t like browsing to any such site for two reasons:
1. I don’t get what I am looking for.
2. They are mostly auto-generated and the content, if any, is haphazard and extremely hard to find.

And I don’t want to direct my visitors to their sites either. So I add them to my competitive ad filter. I don’t care if they are paying top dollars for bidding on a keyword or if there are no ads for the post, which happens more often then you can imagine. They are just junk.

I am thinking of publishing my ban list but I need to check the TOS first.

In the meantime just look for sites with info / search in their domain name. Sometimes they disguise with innocuous souding names too.

Caution: Make sure you don’t click on an ad while checking. I normally right-click (carefully) and copy the url to notepad and then manually extract the actual url of the site. Then I load it in browser to verify. Hope there was a simpler way.

If you make a mistake promptly inform Google Support to subtract the click.

Hope that helps.

Discussion
April 6, 2010: 6:00 am

Yes i also think those ads were really junk. Thanks for sharing.

December 6, 2007: 1:10 pm

Please take a moment to check out a new site for tracking your competitive ad filter lists:

https://www.competitiveadfilter.net/

You can also see the lists of others to see what sites similar to yours are banning. See lists of the most recently banned sites, and the most banned.

Thanks.

April 19, 2006: 6:27 am

[...] Google AdSense competitive ad filter is an excellent way to provide better advertisements and deter MFA’s. One of the grievances for big publishers was the small number of filters you could set per account, merely 200. Apparently Google has silently eliminated the 200 URL limit for filters. [...]


J
January 24, 2006: 11:14 am

Are you going to publish your ban list? I’m thinking about doing same but haven’t read the full TOS either. This seems like an obvious area for collaboration — anybody aware of a more automated ’social’ solution?

YOUR VIEW POINT
NAME : (REQUIRED)
MAIL : (REQUIRED)
will not be displayed
WEBSITE : (OPTIONAL)
YOUR
COMMENT :