Adblock Disguise

Difficulty: Advanced | Updated: May 2, 2019
Pro feature

Showing adverts on your site is easy. Hiding them from adblock not so much. AdRotate Pro has a few measures to try and counter adblockers. One of which is a feature called Adblock Disguise. You can set this up easily in AdRotate Settings.

adblock-disguise

Setting a hash here will sort of scramble the output adblockers look for to hide the adverts.
If they don’t know what to look for, they can’t hide your adverts.

Smart adverts

Hiding from adblock isn’t that hard in itself. The real problem comes from using services such as Google AdSense or Chitika and similar ad servers. They often use a standardised format for adverts and it’s that format that the adblocker looks for. Such adverts are very hard to disguise and the adblocking features do not work for such adverts.

Most self created or non-standard adverts may benefit from Adblock Disguise.

Widgets

Due to the way WordPress works, every AdRotate widget has the phrase adrotate in it’s outputted code. This can not be prevented. So to counter adblockers you should not use the AdRotate widget.

Instead, use a WordPress text widget and put an AdRotate shortcode in there. The shortcode is much more inconspicuous and easier to hide adverts in. Partly because the AdBlock Disguise feature works for it.

If your textwidgets do not support shortcodes in them (some themes don’t allow it) you can enable shortcodes for text widgets in AdRotate Settings as well.

Avoid obvious phrases and keywords

AdRotate can only do so much to disguise your adverts. If you use standard keywords or denominations in your adverts it’s cover is blown immediately and anything AdRotate Pro does to hide the adverts is for nothing.

Example

<a href="http://www.arnan.me"><img alt="" src="http://cdn.ajdg.net/images/arnan-banner.png" /></a>

Notice how the filename has banner in it. Adblock disguise can’t prevent this advert from being blocked by adblock.

Another example:

<a href="http://www.arnan.me"><img alt="" src="http://cdn.ajdg.net/images/arnan-200x200.jpg" /></a>

This advert is also likely to be hidden by adblock. Because the filename has 200×200 in it. Which is a common size for adverts.

It’s therefor very important to not use words like; advert, ad, banner, advertising and similar in your adverts. Also using common sizes for filenames are easily spotted. Common sizes are; 125×125, 468×60, 728×90 and a bunch more. Many people use these numbers in the filename for the banners for example.

Final example:

Some themes add ‘handy’ wrapper tags:

<div class="header-advertising">Your perfectly fine advert code<div>

Notice the name of the wrapper class header-advertising. An all too common practise used in many themes. Adblock Disguise will not be able to fool adblock until you edit your theme and rename/remove that class.

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