The nature of my site means that visitors come back again and again to the pages and I am wondering what will happen to me if the same people click on Adsense ads over and over? The ads that are showing up are highly relevant and are of interest to the visitors, so they may end up clicking 2 or 3 ads. Does Google penalize me for this and if so, how can I prevent it?
Google will not penalize you directly. If it's excessive, they may invalidate the clicks as fraudulent on their backend, but Google knows there isn't a whole lot you can do to prevent people from clicking your ads, so they take care of fraudulent clinks on their end.
do you have any evidence that they "invalidate" clicks? from everything I've heard they just seem to flat out cancel your account when someone click-spams..
Is that not a bit unfair? What if a competitor to your site click spams? (That would be extremely evil )
Like it was said before, I think that Google just doesn't look at multiple clicks after awhile coming from the same IP. For instance, I had a friend that repeated clicked his adsense ads twice a day, and after a couple days, Google just stopped counting his clicks
It isnt unfair- they will validate and remove the spam clicks made by this competitor. Your competitor clicking ads on your page shouldn't make you money.
That's pretty much why I was concerned, because I have seen posts on various message boards in which people said their Adsense account had been yanked because somebody had clicked on the ads too much.
I just contacted Google support again and got a response in 17 minutes-amazing! Let's see Microsoft beat that!