So you have made the decision to at least partially monetize your site with Google Adsense. Great decision!

You sign up, get approved and start creating the formats that you have decided on ( using my Adsense Overdrive report hopefully, you can get it here if you havent already got your copy ). Everything goes smoothly, until you visit your site. There are ads for your main competitor staring right back at you from your own pages. You are effectively providing a place for your competitor to take your business away, and right on your very own site. This is not good, it is bad, very very bad. You need to prevent this from happening, and you cant believe google would do this to you. But its not Googles fault. They identified this as a concern early on and provide a way for you to prevent it from happening. It is called the competitive ad filter. It allows you to prevent your competitors ads from showing up on your site.

Here is what Google has to say about the program (from Googles Adsense Help pages):

“The competitive ad filter works by blocking ads that link to specific URLs. This way, you can easily block all ads that are linked to your competitor at www.example.com. By entering a top level domain such as www.example.com, you’ll also block all ads that link to subdirectories below that domain. The following rules apply to the competitive ad filter:

  • Entering example.com will block ads to example.com and example.com/sub
  • Entering example.com will also block ads to www.example.com and forums.example.com
  • www.example.com will block ads to www.example.com but not to forums.example.com or example.com
  • example.com/sub will not block ads to example.com/products or example.com/sub/index.html

Generally, it’s a good idea to leave the ‘www’ off of URLs in your filter list to provide for broader filtering.”

 

So you can see that everything you need is right there. They even include a tutorial with step by step instructions to set this up. They have made it very easy for you to prevent your competitors from gaining and advantage over you, now lets hope your competitor hasn’t read this post as well and you can reap the rewards so to speak.