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Saturday, August 10

Check Your Google Adsense, Fellow Jacksonville Bloggers

prevent severe impact on revenue
I'm not going to keep this one to myself, since someone not on my site isn't clicking my ads, anyway. If you have a blog or even a big ol' company website that has some Adsense ads on it (the Google ads), then you need to add a custom ads.txt file to your website. I did not receive an email about it. I just showed up to check earnings, which I don't really bother to do very often, and there it was: a dozen websites without the right code. 

If you are on Blogger, and it's monetized through Adsense, then it should be automatic. My problem was that this site IS on Blogger, but my Adsense is technically a 3rd party ad system because I had set it up with a different account or something. So I had to add my custom page even to my Blogger page. 

The basic idea is that you need to download the file from Adsense, upload it to your domain, and then wait for Google to see it. This took about two days. If you have FTP, you can do it that way, but it also works in CPanel. If you only have access to the website and not the actual domain, then you might need to get your web guy to add the file for you. Also, the ads.txt file would not download for me in Firefox, only Chrome.

It's not the same as adding Google Adsense code to the <head> section of your website. Google seems to want to confirm you also own the domain, as I am sure plenty of hackers have found ways to add Adsense code to unwitting websites out there. It's a good thing for all of us that Google is trying to make sure website owners are the ones putting up ads and getting the money from those ads, even if it's a hassle to stick this code on multiple websites. That said, I'm sure most local Jax bloggers have one or two sites to deal with. 

It's simple to check to see if your Blogger or other website is configured properly. Just type yourdomain/ads.txt. The page should look like this:
adsense ads txt

If this helped you keep your Jacksonville blog monetized, make sure to click on an ad to show your appreciation. I'd do it for you.


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