Using Google To Identify a Site’s Owner

Who would’ve thought that Google AdSense could be used to track down the owner of a website?

Anonymous and spam blogs are quite numerous these days. And one would wonder who actually own these. If the sites have Google AdSense, then it’s easy! It’s as easy as viewing the page source on the site, and looking for an AdSense publisher ID.

When you use your browser’s view-source feature, just use the Find command (usually invoked with Ctrl-F) to look for that line of code, which comes with the string “google_ad_client”.

Let’s try it. For instance, we go to www.enadget.com and view the page source. I look for the keyword “client” within the source, and we get the line:

google_ad_client = “ca-aol_weblogs_xml”;

It’s easy to identify, since the site belongs to a large publisher. But if a site is independent, the publisher ID would usually be numeric. What’s important is that once you have this snippet of code, you can do another Google search to look for other sites that the numeric code would appear in, to see which other sites or blogs contain the same publisher ID.