Don’t Let Your Sites Become Victims of Ad Blockers

Feb

2010

As someone viewing websites on the web, ad-blockers filter out adverts for “enhancements”, and a bunch of flashing, ugly advertisements. Not only this, but ad-blockers can help protect you from potentially sneaky and malicious code.

This is why one of the most popular downloads for Firefox is an ad-blocking extension.

However, have you thought about the reverse? What about the effect ad blockers have on your website or the sites you design for clients?

Is my coding style or design choices limiting what’s viewable to visitors because it’s being incorrectly identified as advertising content by ad-blockers?

Choose Your Class and ID Names Carefully

You may reason, “I don’t have to worry about ad-blockers because I don’t have any advertisements on my website”.

But do you really have to reason for concern?

While you may not have a single ad on your site, the names you give your classes and ID’s matter.

Classes and ID’s containing keywords like banner, ban, ad, advertisement, etc may get flagged incorrectly by a visitor’s ad-blocking plugin.

Important sections of information could never appear on the screen because of this.

Avoid:

<p class="panel banner" id="bannercontent1">Real content. Not an advertisement. But still blocked.</p>

Better:

<p class="panel section" id="section1">Real content. Not an advertisement.</p>

Remember, elements with classes and ID’s that contain any filtered keywords run a high risk of being blocked. In theory, an ID or class named ‘bandaid‘ may get filtered as an ad.

Safe Choices For Classes and ID’s

What are safe choices for classes and ID’s?

While there’s no way to know exactly what custom keywords people will add to their blocking list, a good rule of thumb would be to look at the keywords that are contained in the default filter list. This list can usually be found in the ad-blocking extension’s settings.

Avoid using classes or ID’s that contain any of the keywords on the filter list.

Choose Your Images Carefully

You should also pay attention to your choice of images.

Since ad-blockers cannot actually view the contents of an image, they identify advertisements by relying on both the image filename and image dimensions.

Image Filenames and Directories

Images that contain banners, ban, ads, advertisement, and so on in their filenames may very well get flagged as an advertisement and get removed.

You should also be aware of the directory names you choose. For example, using directories that contain words commonly used in banner advertisements are fair game for ad-blockers.