When you’re adding sites to the Google Adsense “Competitive Ad Filter” please do not do what I just did.
As my filter has the maximum 200 urls I have to delete entries before adding new one, but I had deleted a couple of urls so I thought I’d have space for just one more slightly-dodgy low paying ad site. Unfortunately I didn’t and the familiar “Too many lines” error showed.
Normally I would search out another url to delete but I wanted to be done with it and not bother with my last change so I hit return on the url, this url, https://www.google.com/adsense/filter-save.do – thinking that it would reload the old list. It certainly did. It brought me back to day 1 when I had no entries in the filter! You know that sinking feeling? That moment when something has gone really wrong? That was me a few minutes ago.
Thankfully hitting BACK on my browser and confirming the POST operation restored the list and I quickly removed the offending LCPC site. Phew.
Someone should tell Google, this would be a rather quick and easy way for a malicious someone to mess with a person’s filter. They should check for the existance of some POST variables before overwriting the filter. It’s a bug!
Simply because a blog post isn’t a blog post without a link, here’s where I talk about my competitive ad filter. MFA and LCPC sites galore. The MFA sites listed in this post finally made it into the ad filter this morning.
Lucky escape 😉
For whatever good it’ll do. My CPM has been much lower over the last 5 days than the previous 2 months and it’s bugging me that these low cost ads are getting through. It’s probably a seasonal thing.
Like tahts a BIG OUCH!