Aeiouy Banned from Adsense

As some of you may or may not know, I have been a pretty strong supporter of the Adsense program and their policies to prevent fraud. I have often jumped on people who posted they were banned, as it often seemed something wrong was done. I have always been careful with my sites, and contacted Google when I had an issue or a concern.

So color me suprised when I found myself locked out of my Adsense account on August 30th. I thought i might have used the wrong password or something else, but when I checked my mail, I got confirmation. I was a bit perplexed by this and could not come up with a real issue as to why this happened. I went through recent events and eventually identified a few possibilities.

1) I was noticing some income coming in that was not showing up in my url channels or regular channels. I have channels for everything. So when I saw this over a period of time, I reported it to Google and entered into a dialogue on it. Eventually it was suggested by them that it was likely the result of traffic coming from Google images, which is not recorded by reporting channels.

2) One of my sites supports a video game, and recently got some exclusive features that saw a nice spike in traffic. 10-fold or more over what it normally saw.

Beyond that there were some other minor things but nothing substantial. I did not make big money with Adsense, and there was no wild increase in income or activity.

Once receiving my first notice, I sent in an appeal form. I extensively outlined my support of the Adsense program, my suspicions as to some possible canidates for problems, as well as referring to my recent conversation with Google. I was polite and went to great length to explain my situation and how I had not violated the TOS. I felt comfortable that I simply got caught by some auto-trigger and when a proper analysis was done, everything would be rectified.

The next day I followed up my original appeal with some additional information just to provide some other alternatives that might have been issues/concerns. Nothing that I did mind you, nor nothing in violation of the TOS. Then I sat back and waited.

Late on 9/1/2006 I received confirmation that they had received my appeal and were reviewing it. At this point I figured once they completed their review, my account would be reinstated and everything would be fine. In the meantime I worked on replacing a significant portion of my adsense placements with other sources of revenue. I did leave some in place figuring I would hear something soon and everything would be back to normal.

Fast forward to today. Finally I heard back from Google. My suspension was upheld. I find this very disheartening to say the least. I can't prove my innoncence because I honestly do not know what the violation was nor where it happened. I racked my brain trying to guess what might have been the problem, but clearly came up short.

I am overly-cautious almost to a fault. I never even did anything borderline questionable in relation to Adsense. I have reported violating sites in the past, and preached to others to follow the rules and if in doubt to ask questions. That is how I behaved, and I did not have any worries.

I can no longer tow that line obviously. I know that I did not do anything wrong, so I could certainly no longer in good concious tell people that as long as they did everything by the rules they will be just fine. I did and I am gone.

I purposefully did not post about my suspension before now, because I wanted to go through the appeal process, and I honestly believed that my account would be re-instated upon review. I figured it would be unnecessary to incite people based on something that would be cleared up in relatively short order.

I do not know what else to say on the matter. Their final letter basically tells you they will ignore any further correspondance and that they are done with me. If you thought you were safe, maybe you are maybe you are not. There is no way to know. I could only come up with two possibilities because Google proivdes no feedback, so shooting blindly in the dark I had to defend myself the best I could. It was, obviously, an extremely frustrating process, even moreso because the Google system has failed.

 

I think Google is "running scared" with competition hot on their tails they are not able to stop fraud.

Sorry to hear about your problems aeiouy.

 

Really, sorry to hear about this also. You said you were not a major earner with Adsense.. can you mention an xx range, so we can assess what kind of risk it is to what kind of publishers.

 

Man this is terrifying. If this happens to you, what will happen to everyone else?
Sorry for what happened to you. Hope you start making use of other programs.

 

I quoted what you said on www.fakesense.com if you don't mind, I would like to keep it there

 

Sorry to hear about your Gaygle escapades.

edit:

++

/me likes

 

Thankyou, an0n,

I am going to keep stories like those there.

 

I am shocked! period.

Sorry to hear that Aeiouy. It is nothing but a stark reminder to everyone that you could very well be the next person to receive a suspension letter. Google should be transparent while banning out publishers out of the yellow, this robot like reply telling you that you're over is indeed very depressing for every publisher no matter how small or big.

The point of debate here is that why aren't they protecting their publishers?

 

Sorry to hear that aeiouy

 

Wow, even your shared ad here is displaying blanks. Sorry to hear of your difficulties. Give YPN a call.

And, I'm curious what range you were in too? Or how many clicks did you average day?

 

Wow, aeiouy, that's terrible news. I don't understand why so many people are starting to get banned, especially people like you who seem to run legitimate AS sites.

 

The amount of people being banned is alarming.

The failure to disclose reasons for banning due to propriety technology is also becoming an increasing concern among many people - especially those banned that are actually innocent of any wrongdoing.

I am likely not alone in my thinking, but with Google alienating webmasters daily, they are effectively saying to webmasters who they ban that they do not want to do any business with you whatsoever... in this instance, Google are sewing the seeds of their own downfall.

Imagine this scenario:

Webmasters with genuine high traffic sites that get banned from google adsense retaliate by refusing any googlebot access to their websites, couple with shunning any Google products or services.

Some of these webmasters may use adwords and spend $1000s per month promoting their site as well as using Google search and clicking on sponsored results occasionally in serps. If they prevented google from accessing their site it would obviously have an impact on their organic traffic levels - however, Google would also be losing out in revenue that they put into the services.

There are alternative PPC and these webmasters would switch to Googles rivals. So for people who sell products it may not be as huge an impact - although the cumulative affect of losig a customer for life will seriously erode Google dominance in the long term.

Google search results would increasingly show more spam due to their encouragement of webmasters to scrape content by permitting those publishers access to Adsense will continue to alienate corporations and continue to drive people away from using Google.

If adsense are banning 1000s of people per month - the cumulative affect of losing 1000s of customers per month will eventually catch up with them. It may not bankrupt them obviously, but it will give up market share to their rivals. In addition, as Google have to delist sites due to owners blocking google bots, their search results will become less complete, more spam filled and more pointless resulting in a 'poorer customer experience' and this will further drive people away to using rival services.

If all the banned webmasters simply refused to acknowledge Google the way they fail to acknowledge innocent webmasters banned, then it definately is a case of Google policy turning full circle and in affect they could become despised even more than microsoft

 

Exactly. And we thought this was obvious to google!

 

If it can happen to you, then it really can happen to anyone. Very sorry to hear this.

It seems that you participated in DP revenue sharing. Do you think that is a possible reason?

 

There needs to be a large response which kicks Google in the public relations balls to these recent bannings of legitimate publishers.

My suggestion, for what it's worth, is for the large publishers (I can think of a few names) that are well known within this industry to turn off their AdSense ads and state publically the reasons why - in support of the legitimate publishers who Google just keep on banning recently.

It would make great a great publicity stunt and link-bait for those who did it and in a position to band together to lose Google millions in revenue (while this ammount doesn't matter to Google it makes the story/headline that much better!) and with Google AdSense getting such a bad reputation spread fast by some big names in the industry they may actually improve their appeals process and do what they need to do to look after legitimate publishers.

Pete

 

Very sorry to hear that. I'm sure it's a mistake. Your thread likely chills all of us who are operating "above board", counting on the truth to keep us safe.

If you'd like I'd be happy to send this thread to my adsense rep and ask them to please review your account again.

I tried to give you some rep to cheer you up, but I need to spread some more around before giving you more!

If you'd like me to send the mail, pm me to let me know.

Corina

 

In your conspiracy theory what criteria google uses to ban the monthly quota, random ?

 

That's pretty lame that they won't tell you specifically why you were banned. You would think that they would be interested in keeping their advertisers happy....

 

This recent increase in banning by Adsense is disturbing.

1. Google has the ability to block/discount invalid clicks without banning but they don't.

2. Google could provide us with better tools for determining invalid clicks, click bomb attacks, etc. but they don't.

I understand why Google can't reveal information about their algorithm, but I'd be interested in hearing any speculation why G doesn't provide publishers with a little assistance on the above 2 issues.