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I just brushed aside the warnings about the list of “Unauthorized sites” on my Adsense account. Doing nothing, like leaving those sites in your list, does not hurt at all. But lately, message after message from Google kept appearing on the Adsense homepage, telling me I may be losing some revenues for not allowing the sites to carry my Adsense code.

The warning says: “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.”

When finally I decided to take a look at the list, I found out that most of the “Unauthorized sites” are local Google sites — Google websites from other countries with extension other than the usual dot com. Here is the list of what I have:

www.google.ae
www.google.at
www.google.be
www.google.bg
www.google.ca
www.google.cl
www.google.cm
www.google.co.cr
www.google.co.in
www.google.co.jp
www.google.co.ma
www.google.co.uk
www.google.co.za
www.google.com.ar
www.google.com.au
www.google.com.br
www.google.com.eg
www.google.com.hk
www.google.com.jm
www.google.com.mx
www.google.com.my
www.google.com.ph
www.google.com.pr
www.google.cz
www.google.dk
www.google.es
www.google.gr
www.google.ie
www.google.it
www.google.nl
www.google.ro
www.google.ru
www.google.se
www.google.sk

Beside each site is a link that says “authorize”. Will I authorize the sites and earn additional pennies? There are quite a number of forums that suggested it is okay to authorize all of them. According to top contributors in the Adsense forum, the local Google sites will show up when someone loads your cached/translated page from a Google search. If that person were to click the ads then you would earn from it.

If you allow these sites, does that mean they are using your code? The answer is no. You are only “allowing your ads to show up (and possibly be clicked) by users who are seeing your pages via Google Translate and/or cached copies of the pages.” And since the sites are official local Google sites, then you are fine. However, it will still be a personal choice.

The allowed-sites feature of Adsense exists to give users the control over some bogus sites that are using your ad code, then click bombing you to get your account suspended, or placing your ads (publisher ID) on websites with questionable contents prohibited by AdSense.

I have tried contacting Adsense, but to no avail. I believe, they do not reply to questions regarding this “allowed or unauthorized sites” feature. The best thing to do right now, is trust the forums. If majority of the opinions say it is okay, then, most likely, it is okay.