Joe Hayes {dot} Org

As a webmaster serving Google Adsense advertising, one of the most important things is taking care not to click your own ads. Doing so is not only unethical (cheating advertisors), it will also get you banned. So how can an honest webmaster prevent accidentally clicking their own ads? It’s happened to the best of us, no matter how hard we try. Short of disabling all javascript (not a good idea, many sites today rely on Java for various functions), there are a few easy ways to selectivly block adsense ads from being served to your browse.

Internet Explorer users can simply edit their host file, found in these places:

Windows 9x, ME C:\WINDOWS
Windows NT (and some 2K) C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc
Windows 2K, XP, 2003 C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

At the first blank line you see (probably under a localhost line), add:

127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com

Pretty easy huh? This will cause all references to the Adsense server to refer to your own computer (localhost) instead – resulting in nothing being returned. If you use Firefox you can install the AdBlock extension, which is easy enough and instructions can be found on that site.