We all know that we shouldn't be clicking on our own ads as that's cheating and could get ourselves banned from Google. Clearly, Google is entitled to and does monitor clicks to check for cheats, but what I was wondering was what would happen if someone maliciously clicked on ads on your pages. I mean, not once or twice but hundreds of times, maybe from multiple IP addresses, sending your click through rate to an unusual high sending alarm bells ringing at Google HQ. How would Google react to this? It would be unfair to block the owner of the website (as they had no involvement) but Google would have no way of knowing this to be the case. If I were Google, I'd rightly suspect some form of collusion, but if Google did block accounts when events like this happened, it could be used maliciously. e.g. X doesn't like Y, so X spends all day clicking Google Ads on Y's website until Y gets banned from receiving any more revenue from Google. Just wondering...
You mean Adsense, not Adwords, and if you look in the Adsense forum, http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=27 you will see that people get banned for this all the time. As they should - the publisher of the site has the responsibilty for monitoring and keeping their site a credible part of the programme.
Thanks for the reply and correction - yes, I should have said Adsense - but I think you have missed the point of my post which was to ask what would happen if someone (totally unconnected and out of your control) decided to go on a click extravaganza on your website. Surely, you should not get banned for another person's actions, however bad? I'm not suggesting that anyone tries this, but I've sometimes wondered how Google protects responsible website owners from such malicious (and possibly criminal) actions.
I don't think Imissed the point at all - I said they do ban publishers for this. I don't think it's always automatic - but there's a limit to how much babysitting they'll do. And I bet every publisher who set up a bot to click his own ads insists that a competitor did it. As I said before, it's ultimately the publisher's responsibility. If they think they've been click-bombed they should take the ads off straight-away and contact Google.
Still looking forward to read more information regarding the the question of the thread maker, it is not fair that Google will ban a site if someone or a competitor do something out of your control to banned you by Google.
Nobody has a right to get money from Adsense. The money comes from the pockets of us hard-pressed advertisers. And speaking as one, I want to be sure that my ads are off a site the NANO SECOND there's a question mark over that site's integrity. I don't care whose fault it is, I just don't want my money wasted.