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Google Security

Google AdSense And SSL

Google’s implementation of AdSense never ceases to amaze me. AdSense has been a major source of revenue for many websites for a few years now and has allowed many businesses to succeed where previously they would have had little chance. It’s a great program and I appreciate how it allows websites to monetize content quickly and with little effort. That said, I’m still so confused by Google’s implementation. It just doesn’t make much sense.

Since July 2007 Google AdSense has had the ability to crawl login protected pages so that it can scan (and therefore provide relevant ads) to pages behind logins. This is great since many pages on sites, in particular social networks where the the majority of page views are post-login can now be monetized.

Despite this progress, Google still doesn’t provide an SSL version of AdSense, so while the page itself can be served over SSL, the ad isn’t. This is problematic since the browser will alert the user that the page is not entirely secure. I really don’t understand why this can’t be done. Google does appear to scan these pages as the ads are relevant, so I don’t think the crawler is the issue. They just don’t want to serve ads over SSL.

Come on Google, the web would be a much more secure place if AdSense supported SSL. It would remove a big reason for sites to not use SSL in places that they should.

For those who would argue that putting third party ads on an SSL page defeats the purpose, that’s only partially true. Yes in an ideal world there’s no third party content on an SSL page. In the real world, Google already supports using SSL with Google Analytics (as do virtually all other analytics services), and you can bet almost any SSL page you access has some analytics on it already. This is no worse. If anything it’s better since unlike Analytics, the nature of the service involves much less recording of user behavior.

By not supporting SSL it’s just encouraging sites to not use it in places where a users privacy and security would be better off with it.

3 replies on “Google AdSense And SSL”

Thanks for the post. I am not alone 🙂

I would like to deliver https pages with ads so I can reduce the cost to the end user. For one app I would like it to be free. But Google doesn’t support it.

Do you recommend any other Ad programs that will work?

Thanks for sharing this info. Its about time Google changes this!

It keeps amazing me how stubborn Google is with this. All they have to do is change a couple of things in their adsense scripts and everything is solved. How hard can it be???

Thanks for confirming my disappointment in a giant such as Google not being able to sort out such a small issue for websites that go to great length to create a secure environment for their visitors, just to have the site turn out to look ‘suspect’ because a pop up tells the visitor that there is unsecured content, which ultimately is just the Google Adsense, and in some instances other Google widgets that they offer to enhance a domain, causing the SSL’d site to warn the visitor.

Best wishes,
HH

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