First off, this post is a bit of a deviation from our normal hobby/interest posts. Recently there has been some suspicious activity with the blog and Adsense. This forced us to do a bit of research on what to do for these situations. We might as well pass the knowledge onto you.

1) Go to your Adsense account (easy if you use Gmail) and figure out if you're in the old or new format. New format is set as the default for all new accounts and there is growing pressure not to use the old format.

2) On the Account Settings option, select Access and Authorization. Here is where some problems with Adsense occur. Select "Only allow certain sites," and then input your blog's URL. You really don't want to allow others to use your ads on sites you know nothing about, so don't leave it open. This seems like a huge hole in security on Google's part, and they leave it up to the user to figure out.

3) Make sure only people you know are Editors or have Admin privileges for your blog. Simple enough, but sometimes you might grant Editor status to someone for one post and then you forget they still have it.

4) Emergency reports. If you're like us and notice suspicious activity, you'll want to report it (several times) to Adsense. Invalid Click report page, Policy Violation report page, and Adsense Ban Appeal form are pages worth taking a look at depending on your situation.

5) Take proactive measures. "Click bombing" and other invalid activity happens quite often apparently. The best thing to do is be proactive and have measures prepared to deal with it. My method is to use a third-party statistics recorder. A popular one is StatCounter. Just register, configure settings, and add the HTML code to your blog's HTML Widget in the Design page. It can record all the information you'll need to fight back.


That is all for today. We were planning on finishing up part 2 of our Stealth Drinking article as well as getting our Liquor Log started, but I guess that can wait until Monday. Cheers, be prepared, and good luck y'all.