Yikes! What an icky message for a Monday morning! I log into my adsense account and see this message:
Your ads have recently appeared on websites you haven’t authorized. To avoid lost revenue, make sure to authorize any sites where you display ads by visiting your account settings.
Only is looks like this – with the bright yellow to let me know it’s a warning I ought to be frightened about:
OK. So I look at my account settings page and see under: Sites authorized to show ads
I have Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account selected and it tells me the unauthorized site translate.googleusercontent.com has been showing my ads.
Time for some google research…
It seems that googleusercontent.com is a google domain that they use when translating pages or displayed cached results instead of serving them from just IP numbers. So it’s not like it’s some suspicious website using your content in unknown ways. Rather it’s just google using your content in all the ways google uses it.
https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021929.html
So is it OK for it to be serving your adsense ads?
The most informative links I found were:
On the Warrior Forum:
https://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/603223-need-adsense-help-what-webcache-googleusercontent-com.html
The suggestion was to allow google to show ads when they translate your pages, however another user pointed out that it barely has any clicks (which makes sense since it probably isn’t very often that someone is looking at sites in a foreign language and getting them translated).
On another site:
https://www.icantinternet.org/2011/05/google-web-cache-google-user-content/
The suggestion was that you can trust the sites because they are google.
I looked in my adsense account under performance reports and selected by sites and there is a heading on the chart for “web caches and other” which in the last 30 days has had 2 page views (and zero clicks). That doesn’t seem like it’s likely to be a source of revenue so I’ve decided for now to not allow it. The potential for reward is almost zero, so why risk having any problems with my adsense account?
As near as I can tell, this means that I will now have this warning going on forever due to the way google processes its own use of my website. Which means that I will have to check manually to make sure when I add another adsense site that I remember to add it to my allowed sites. Since it is now September 2012 and one of the references I found was from May 2011, it doesn’t seem that google is likely to be rushing to fix this lack of trust they have for their own cache.
I also have a same announcement from GA, I do not allow them, I just allow the site that I used to apply for GA, it’s safe to protect the account.