Last week a ripple went through the world of Adsense Publishers with the release of Google’s new Adsense feature, the ‘allowed sites’ list. There were whoops of online glee from Adsense Webmasters and Bloggers in forums and blogs around the world. Here in the UK there was a national holiday last Monday so maybe that is why I was a little slow in deciding whether the ‘allowed sites’ facility was a good or bad thing. I need not have worried because, almost in the time it takes to say ‘widget‘, the feature had disappeared. The Google team in China developed this tool, which is similar to the way you ‘whitelist’ your list of email contacts so their messages reach your inbox. But there is a big difference: if a message drops into your spam folder by mistake you can get it back: if you fail to include a URL in your ‘Adsense Allowed Sites’ list you cannot get the lost Adsense earnings back. The advertiser will pay for the clicks, but it looks as if Google will keep the money. You can check Google’s own policy on this: with typical understatement, they include this advice in the Adsense Help Center:-

“What if I forget to include some sites in my list of Allowed Sites?
If you forget to include some sites or URLs in the list of allowed sites, the earnings accumulated through those sites and URLs will not be credited to your account. Therefore, please make sure that you keep your Allowed Sites list up-to-date whenever you place the AdSense code on a new site or URL.”

So why was the Allowed Sites feature withdrawn so quickly, since it was a welcome addition for Adsense publishers who had been many of the concerned about code theft and click sabotage. Well, nobody seems to know. The ‘allowed Adsense sites’ tool had been beta tested for several months but there is no explanation that I can find to say precisely why it was withdrawn - sorry, rolled back - so quickly. It is highly likely to be restored soon, so Adsense publishers will then have the choice to use it or not - I hope. Or is the use of the Allowed Sites tool going to be compulsory? At the moment I would not want to use the tool. I not well enough organised to be sure that I have included the URLS of all my sites and blogs in the Adsense console, so it would by just my luck to find that I have been leaving a chunk of Adsense income on the Google table if I failed to include a well-performing Adsense site.

Another reason why I would hesitate to enable the Allowed Sites list is that there are more sources of Adsense income than your own web pages or blogs. Several forums allow members to include their Adsense Publisher ID to share the forum’s Adsense Income. In addition to that, other sources of indirect traffic would be closed to you as an income source. For an explanation of these traffic sources, read Amit Agarwal’s analysis of Allowed Sites - he explains it much better than I can! As for code fraud and hijacked Publisher IDs, these would soon show up if another site included your Publisher number and I am sure it would be straightforward to prove that you neither owned nor had access to any undesirable site that decided to use your Adsense ID.