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Ads.txt not being updated

Mariam Guerrero

Hi!

I have been trying for two days now to update my ads.txt - I would download the code as this is the only way thats ever worked. I would then purge my Siteground cache from WP and then doing caching on my siteground account but it still doesnt update. 

Can anyone please help me?

Thank you!

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Comments

8 comments

Date Votes
  • Mariam Guerrero

    Hi. 

    Can anyone help me please? My ads.txt has not been updated for a while now and I am worried this will affect my earnings.

     

    Thank you

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  • Support
    • Journey Support Team

    Mariam Guerrero - sorry to hear you're having trouble! We have guided instructions on how to update here. If you are bumping into issues getting the right file updated, I recommend connecting with your host. 

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  • Mariam Guerrero

    Thank you for your response. i have just followed everything that the guide says and contacted siteground and this is what they have said ' On the other note, it is possible that their crawler is hitting a security rule on the server, which naturally blocks it. While this system can't be disabled, could you check with their support what User agent and/or IP is their crawler using so we can whitelist it.; would you eb able to let me know so I could get them to whitelist it and hopefully that will work

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  • Support
    • Journey Support Team

    Mariam Guerrero - having any type of security running on /ads.txt can potentially jepordize earnings, as advertisers use this file to verify your site identity. Additionally, advertisers do not publicly share the user agents or IP addresses of their bots, meaning the only option that will ensure that they can access this file is to have security removed, in full, from your ads.txt domain

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  • Mariam Guerrero

    Thank you for your response. The only way it worked is by them redirecting the URL which got my ads.txt verified. I found this crawler info ‘MediavineMetadataParser’ which they checked and said that they couldnt find any failed attempts and they also said “As of now, there are no blocks on our end that would prevent requests to the URL….”  Does this mean there is no security issues? So I asked them to redirect the URL and it worked. Can you please confirm if this means there are no longer any issues that could affect my earnings now?

     

    Thank you

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  • Mariam Guerrero

    Just to add to the previous post, siteground just got back to me and said : 

     

    We have a server-side web application firewall (WAF), which uses custom rules to protect SiteGround-hosted sites. Checking the logs from today, I see that two IPs were denied access to the ads.txt URL due to them using obsolete User-Agents:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

    The two user-agents correspond to Google Chrome 118 and 120, both of which are significantly outdated, considering the fact that the current version is 142. As such, if a given advertiser has issues accessing the ads.txt file due to them being stopped by our WAF, it is their sole responsibility to either use a contemporary up-to-date user-agent, or use a custom user-agent so it does not impersonate a web browser.

     

    Does this affect my earnings in any way (my ads.txt have been verified btw but just wondering if this will affect my earnings or ads)

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  • Support
    • Journey Support Team

    Mariam Guerrero - advertisers don't share details on the user-agents they use to access this file. While I do understand that Siteground is attempting to disuade older user-agents from being able to access your site's Ads.txt file, any security could lead to advertisers not being able to access this file. 

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  • Mariam Guerrero

    Just want to check if this is affecting me in any way now? as he did mentioned that the two user agents are outdated. I just want to make sure that there is nothing that could affect my earnings on journey

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Our support staff is monitoring this forum everyday for bugs related to ad delivery, the display and functionality of the Journey dashboard, and any bugs related to the onboarding process. We are typically unable to assist with non-bug related issues like RPM performance expectations, issues setting up the ads.txt file, and questions already answered by our existing help docs. Read here for a more detailed breakdown of how Journey is self-supported and our recommendations for how to find answers to common issues.

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