How to Get Around AdBlock

More and more people are installing Advertising Blocking plugins in their browser.

I’m guilty of using Adblock too as it reduces clutter on websites and makes the web a more friendly place.

Adblock Plus is especially nice on news and social media sites as some of the sites have started to put giant blocks of advertisements everywhere.

That said, if you run a blog and make your living from advertising then Adblock and Adblock Plus are your worst nightmare!

In this article I’ll discuss how to get around common Adblock plugins on your personal site so that your ads are still visible to your visitors even if they use Adblock or Adblock Plus.

First, How do Adblockers Work?

Adblock can’t actually see the image that your ad contains, so it has to look for other tell-tale signs of ads. Here are just a few of the things Adblock looks for:

• CSS styling that uses ‘ad’ or ‘advertisement’ or similar
• Images that are served from Ad networks instead of from your domain
• Affiliate links around images
• Images with ‘ad’ or other keywords in the file name
• Images that are ad-specific sizes (in some cases)

These are just a few of the thing that Adblock is looking for. When it finds any of these things it completely removes the block of code from the browser, and as a result the user sees nothing.

How Can You Get Around This?

If you’re using Adblock or Adblock Plus you should still be able to see advertisements on my website. It’s actually pretty easy for you to do the same.

Step 1 – Save the banner ad that you want to use to your desktop. Don’t hotlink the ad from another website!

Step 2 – Name the Image something vague. I named my Genesis image gns.jpg.

Step 3 – Upload the re-named image to your website. If you’re using WordPress, upload it directly through the Media tab.

Step 4 – Install a link cloaking plugin. I use Pretty Link. This allows you to cloak your affiliate links and make them look like they’re pointing to another location on your website. For example, my Genesis Affiliate link is: http://richkent.com/uses/genesis

Step 5 – Create cloaked links for all of your affiliate links. I prefer to use /recommends/product, or /site/website.

You can’t create links that have the same URL’s as a post, so if you have a post with this URL: http://yoursite.com/hostgator, and you make a Pretty Link that’s just /hostgator, this is going to cause a problem. That’s why I start most of my redirect links with /recommends/

Step 6 – Manually place your ad images with your pretty links on your website or in the sidebar. In general they should look like this:

<a href=”http://yoursite/recommends/product”><img src=”http://yoursite/wpcontent/uploads/bannername.jpg”></a>

And that’s it. If the banner doesn’t display correctly you can always add a little CSS to fix the position on your site. Generally you’ll want to use margins, so:

<a href=”http://yoursite/recommends/product”><img style=”margin: 5px 5px 10px 0;” src=”http://yoursite/wpcontent/uploads/bannername.jpg”></a>

Just remember that when using margin the first number is how much space you want to add above, second number is space to the right, 3rd number is space below, and the 4th number is the space to the left.

Also, you can use negative margins in some cases – so margin: -20px 10px 0 -20px; and so on.

That’s it, it’s really not that difficult. I know it’s tempting to use the banner ads directly from the advertisers website, but with more and more savvy internet users using Adblock this simple trick is a must!

Thanks for reading and feel free to ask questions in the comments.