The quality of Adsense traffic has never been as good as pure search traffic but has worked reasonably well for quite a few clients. Recently Google has expanded its Adsense network and in some instances this has resulted in traffic being downright diabolical.

The problem is Google only allow advertisers to exclude partners when using cost per click, but don't actually provide a complete list of who the ads get distributed to in the first place. Using CPM you get better targeting options, but this generally is not as well used as the CPC targeting.

Kim Malone at the New York Times reports that

"Google will begin listing all publisher websites where AdWords advertiser's ads are being run"

To be honest we have known about this for weeks but now it's public I guess we can talk about it as well ;-)

This is great news for everyone accept the unscrupulous affiliates, as now agencies will be able to run their own tools to spot contextual spam networks. Complete distribution control would be ideal, but this opt-up policy with disclosure, will definitely be a step forward when it arrives, hopefully sooner rather than later.