Google Adsense does’t catch it..

I don’t know for sure what’s happening, I have a suspicion that AdSense is requesting the URL in a way that ends up with a response that the file isn’t actually there, but they’re very opaque so it’s hard to know. Is their support responsive? I could give you something to ask them if so.

In the meantime, the thing I suspect (cachebusting query strings) is something we have on the radar to support better so we may incidentally fix this at some point, but if we can confirm that as the issue we can speed things up a bit.

Hi thanks for your reply.

Is their support responsive?

Well Google doesn’t offer any support on Google Adsense unless you have huge adsense account. They just refer to their forums with other “just as desparate” users that cannot do anything about each others issues.

So we cannot even contact their support and ask them why adsense is doing this. We can easily see the code is working fine in the browser e.g. https:/mydomain.com/ads.txt, so it is pretty odd.

Not sure what do do about this. Adding an ads.txt file in the root won’t work because WP standalone and WPMU overrides and ignores it when you call for it in the browser and just serves a 404 page instead. Hence why using code/plugin is a must, (Which I strongly assume you already know.. ?? ).

Well, hope springs eternal I suppose ?? You *should* be able to add a file in the root, if it’s on the server most configurations will see that first before WordPress even has a chance to kick in. That said, we’ll see what we can do about setting up a test for this and also at least take a look at the suspected fix, it would be nice to be able to confirm instead of just releasing new versions and hoping though!

Thought of one thing that might shed some light here if you’re able: could you pull raw access logs for your site and look for any entries for ads.txt? I’d be looking for something like Googlebot, but any entries especially for crawlers you can find would be helpful!

That said, we’ll see what we can do about setting up a test for this and also at least take a look at the suspected fix

Thanks that would be appreciated.

could you pull raw access logs for your site and look for any entries for ads.txt?

Sure, I’ll take a look in my server’s logs and see if I can find anything related to ads.txt. Do you have a contact form that I could submit it too if I find anything of interest in regards to the above?

Thanks..

Sure thing, you can email opensource@10up.com ??

Hi Helen.
I sent you an email. Did you receive it?

Kind regards

@angrywarrior hey there, I’m confirming receipt of your email and will look through that with the team to see if that helps point us in an obvious direction for a fix. I’ll get back to you with any additional questions, but certainly keep us posted if you identify anything else that may help us triage this… thanks!

Thanks for the confirmation!

I have no ideas so far.I’ve been doing a lot internet searches, and at Google self-support forums too etc as mentioned above, but nope; I’ve found nothing to point me in a right direction.

An update here that triage through @angrywarrior’s server log led us to the .htaccess file that appears to have lots of blacklisting and some file restrictions that may be causing this. We’ll await some testing by @angrywarrior to see what may be the culprit limiting Adsense access to the ads.txt file, updates to follow for anyone following this thread or reading it in the future.

Hi guys.

We sent you a email with the solution to the issue.

Thank you very much for pointing us in the right direction. ??

Kind regards

@angrywarrior yes, confirming that we were able to resolve your issue and noting for others in the future to check for compatibility issues with the Defender security plugin. Noting specifically that it denied access to all txt files (among other file types) and that removing that prevision ensured that the ads.txt files were properly visible by AdSense.

Previous entry by Defender in the .htaccess file:

## WP Defender - Prevent information disclosure ##
<FilesMatch "\.(md|exe|sh|bak|txt|inc|pot|po|mo|log|sql)$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

Updated entry in the .htaccess file:

## WP Defender - Prevent information disclosure ##
<FilesMatch "\.(md|exe|sh|bak|inc|pot|po|mo|log|sql)$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

• This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Jeffrey Paul.