Google AdSense Doesn’t Give a Crap About Blocked Advertisers List

Weird one would think..why on earth would Google AdSense give you an option to block adsense ads and then not give a crap? To be honest, it is not that it doesn’t give crap. I’ve used the block advertisers feature since day 1 I signed up and it has WORKED like a charm.

And it still does work perfectly fine..with one little exception: It doesn’t work when the URL you’ve blocked is a Google Product.

I live in italy, and while fixing some bugs on one of my sites where I do use adsense I did see this ad

Google Social Network still displaying ads despite being a blocked advertiser

The above is an advertisement of Google+ (the ad is run through Google Italy, just in case someone might be wondering if I’ve blocked the right url). The funny thing is, that ad should not display on any of my AdSense channels as I have Google blocked as advertiser (instructions how to block an advertiser from showin ads on your ad channels can be seen here).

If you read the instructions above and confront it with the image bellow you will see that I have blocked a google domain with the broad match, meaning, any subpage or subdomain of that domain..gets blocked. Here is a screenshot of my adsense blocked advertisers URLs

Several Google URLs being blocked on broad match. Meaning every subdomain, page or directory of given domain should be blocked.

Yet, the G+ ad appears on my adsense channels, and as if that wasn’t enough on a completely off and non targeted site (it is not a site about marketing, social media or anything related to that).

Could it be that I get to see that ad because i’ve been on facebook? Well i got disabled even the Interest-based Ads Preference but still..I get slammed with G+ ads despite it being blocked and interest based ads are turned off and I bet even the visitors of my site are getting slammed with the same ads.

I will end this article in a stupid way because it is stupid to see ads from blocked advertisers.

Edit: There was one sneaky move that I had missed, Youtube.com was not on the blocked URLs list. Will see if blocking it will indeed stop this crap from happening.

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