When I read about the new Google Adsense feature "Allowed Sites" a couple of weeks ago, I thought I'd set it up on my account just to make sure no sites were displaying my Adsense code on their own sites, which could end up getting my account banned or flagged as suspicious due to factors outside my control.
Let's face it, if they're displaying my Adsense code, they've probably scraped or copied my site content without my consent, so who knows what else they may be up to!

Anyway I logged into Adsense recently and decided to check out the Allowed Sites page, and this is what I read...

There are unauthorized sites that have displayed ads using your AdSense publisher ID within the last week. Please click here to view them.

So I did click here, but all I got were some IP addresses:

Site URL
72.14.253.104
64.233.183.104
72.14.235.104
209.85.129.104
66.102.9.104
216.239.59.104
209.85.135.104
64.233.169.104
64.233.167.104

A little intrigued to what these IP addresses were, I decided to investigate further by issuing a trace route command to glean some more information.

C:\Documents and Settings\Nik>tracert 64.233.183.104

The trace route results resolved the IP addresses all to Google. I'm guessing that these are in my list because of people viewing my sites in Google's cached pages; So panic over!
Would be good if Google could filter out it's own IP addresses from the list though, so I don't have to check out each IP individually.

Google have added an "Allowed Sites" feature in the Adsense console to stem a problem that has been talked about for a while.
Lots publishers have had their site content stolen and re-purposed in an almost identical fashion on another domain, specifically to earn the criminal money from advertising without spending time and effort writing content themselves.
In some cases the HTML contained the victim's Adsense code, which when uploaded to a "junk" domain with other duplicate content, essentially associated the original publisher with a bad site in Google's eyes.
To protect Google's Adsense publishers from being associated with this crime and having their Adsense accounts potentially banned, Google has developed the "Allowed Sites" feature which allows the Adsense publisher to tell Google which domains it publishes to.

What this won't do is stop people stealing your content and code, nor will it stop people hacking into your web server and changing the Adsense account ID in the Adsense Javascript to the criminals Adsense ID, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

The British Pound broke through the physiological barrier of $2 yesterday due to the relative strength of the British economy. For us Brits this has some advantages like cheap shopping trips to New York, and some negatives such as companies who export goods to the US will suffer due to their goods becoming more expensive to American importers.

It also affects British web publishers who earn money from American companies. Affiliate programs like Google's Adsense, Amazon Associates etc are all paid in US dollars. Some schemes have the option of holding payments, but with the weakening economy in the US this exchange rate might be with us for some time.

I received an email from Amazon Associates yesterday explaining their contextual adverts are now out of closed beta and are now available for their associates to use (although still in beta).

I checked out the demo sites they mentioned, looked at the source HTML and logged into the Associates homepage to see what customisations were available.

All it requires is a few Javascript includes at the foot of the page and all the rendering is done client-side. Essentially any word(s) on your page can be linked to Amazon or Amazon Marketplace items, and they're all relevant!

No More Manual Links!

Hold your horses! Those of you who are Adsense publishers beware! I have been reading Adsense terms and conditions and some blog posts and I'm pretty sure you can't use Adsense and Amazon Context Links ads on the same page.

Does anyone have Google's official stance on this?

What about Amazon's terms and conditions? Do they have similar terms concerning competitor contextual ads?

At the end of the day, you can't blame Google from wanting to hold on to it's huge Adsense publisher network.