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Google AdSense gives publishers and blog administrators the option to block specific ads from appearing on your website by using the Competitive Ad Filter. Why would you want to block certain ads from showing up on your website? Although Google Ads are highly targeted to the content of the page on which you are serving ads, there are situations where you don’t want a particular advertisement from showing up. An example could be that you wish to block ads from your competitors.

Important TIP: The Competitive Ad Filter works by blocking ads that link to specific URLs. When you plug in a website you wish to block, leave of the ‘www’ off of URLs in your filter list as this allows for broader filtering. For example, entering www.blockthis.com will block ads to www.blockthis.com but not to ads.blockthis.com or blockthis.com.

Set up your AdSense Competitive Ad Filter

Step # 1: Log into your AdSense account at https://www.google.com/adsense. If you are new to Google AdSense, you can sign up to

Step # 2: Click the AdSense Setup tab. Beneath the tabs that appear, click Competitive Ad Filter. If you are setting up the filter for the first time, the text box will be empty.

Step # 3: Choose the appropriate product sub-tab among either “AdSense for Content” or “AdSense for Search”.

Step # 4: Type in the URL of the site you wish to block and add to your filter list. If you see an ad on your website, you can find the URL of that Advertisement either by using the Google AdSense Preview Tool or by looking it up manually. Once you obtain the URL of the ad using either of the two methods above, you can add to this list.

Step # 5: Click Save Changes to add the sites to your Competitive Ad Filter. According to Google, it usually takes around 4 hours for these changes to be implemented.

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