Better Stats & Virus Protection

About a month a go I upgraded my virus protection at home and found I could no longer see a stack of banners from one of my sites.

After much fiddling around it turned out to be a 'Block Advertisement' feature of my virus protection which was disabling banners that were hosted by various affiliate programs.

Rather than disabling this feature I looked at the cause of the problem, which appears to be down to banners that are remotely hosted. After moving the banners locally and using local 'redirects' my stats have improved quite nicely.

Now I know the increase in stats is helped by other factors as well, but it certainly seems to have made a positive difference for me.

Just looking at a couple of sites here I can see people are using remotely hosted banners and they are either stripped from your site completely or displayed as a little red X instead.

Have I done the right thing by moving them locally ?

The only advantage I can see of them being remote is that they may get updated occasionaly.

It would be good to hear your feedback.

Thanks for the heads up. I can see how the "virus" protection software would black incoming images on stronger filter settings. I don't have proof like yours, but it sounds logical.

I'll try placing my banners locally and having internal nofollow redirects to the affiliate links and see how it goes.

The only question I have is whether or not it would break the TOS's of the affiliate program to copy them and place them locally. I don't think they would mind, but you never know. It would certainly mess up their "impressions" per banner, but that's not important relative to the potential increase in conversions.