If you are wondering how to get rid of spammy ads like download ads that Adsense is serving on your blog, I’m glad to help you with this because I personally struggled for months with spammy download ads in particular because I didn’t know about this one hidden part of Adsense!
In Adsense, it is intuitive to visit the “Allow & Block Ads” tab. It has multiple ways to block certain types of ads. But guess what? By blocking all Download Ads, it did nothing to reduce the amount of download ads I had. (at this point, I have said the word download so much in this post, that it is a sure thing that you will at some point see random download ads that slip through my fences!)
Make sure and visit the very last tab in “Allow & Block Ads”, called “Ads (Ad review center)”. When you open this tab, it shows you a preview of every ad that is currently serving on your site. It looks like this:
You can usually easily spot them by the green bars. I don’t know who wrote the memo to the download providers to make all their Download buttons green #3aa500, but it seems to be the industry norm. Just go through and choose the arrow next to Block. Then a pop up says “Block this AdWords account”. I choose that. And then, I also choose Block after that. The double block!
There are a lot of pages to scroll through, so make sure and click the forward arrow in the bottom left of the screen to view them all (do it while you are watching TV because it takes forever and is tedious). And, you will need to “clean house” about once a month, because new Download ads will crop up!
I did not know this Jill!! Thank you!
Yeah! Saved my life! I was drowning in download ads!
Can you explain what a download add is, and why it is bad? I’m just looking into adsense. Thanks for the info.
Yay!! This is so helpful! I tried adsense a couple months ago and got rid of it pretty much immediately after seeing boobs front and center on my Christian living site. I knew you could block things, but I didn’t know how. So now I’m trying it again. Wish me luck!
Awesome Brittany! I hope you can get it under control! I had a mess to deal with when I figured it out, but I blocked them all and it has been great since then!
Thank you so much for the great tips.. Myself was having a hard time with placing first ad in my blog from Adsense.. Just now I followed all the steps from another blog post of yours regarding that topic..fingers crossed , excited to see ad appearing in my blog?!!
I loved your awesome blog..
nice guide, but in my case it is not showing when i clicked the review center.