Having been a proponent and user of Adsense from the beginning, I received this email for the first time ever today: It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs may include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites. I have imposed an anti-Google clicking within our organization not only on our sites but on ANY site via company computers. I have no evidence of anyone using "third party programs" and, of course, Google won't say what they are seeing. My question: what are my options here? What can I do about it? I'm as upset by the insinuation that my organization is doing something against the TOS or that is unethical than I am at the possiblity of losing Google as a source of revenue. I don't need them but want to continue with them. What to do?
Have you used any autosurf or paid to surf/read/click sites to get traffic to your site? Double-check your stats to see if you are getting traffic from any of these types of sites.
I was just looking over my channel stats for today and I have ONE PAGE that has had a grand total of five visits and on every visit a click has been registered. That had to be what triggered it.
I've seen stats where my clicks on certain pages exceeded my page views. But, those have never generated that letter. I did receive that letter once -- but I'm still an AdSense publisher.
Nope, never. I do occasionally get traffic from StumbleUpon but not because of anything we've done. All of our traffic is organic or gets generated through legitimate advertising (adwords, ironically). I've got news for Google: if they kick me out of adsense, I'm done with adwords.
Second Tier PPC's like epilot, goclick & others are rife with paid to surf garbage traffic. I was doing some arbitrage and installed heavy duty geo & ip filtering to block these clowns, but they still came faster than I could filter. I was running an Azoogle type alternative to adsense & was dropped from their program due to click fraud. You or your employees don't have to be the ones clicking - we certainly weren't. I currently use google analytics and only install Google or YPN on sites that prove in advance to have squeeky clean (mostly google - yahoo - msn) organic traffic.
edzachary, Try to keep calm with them all of the time while writing and explaining your side of the story. Give them access to your logs & whatever else you can think of. Good luck so that they will take you back
I d received that same mail while ago, becouse of i bought traffic from a guy without thinking much. after that I try to stick with search engine based traffic.
Yeah, I know. I'm just a very small fish in a very large pond. I haven't lost my account with them, I just hope not to. I'm frustrated because I'm now spending time on this when I have better things to do. That makes the revenue from Google less valuable to me and makes me more prone to use something else less high maintenance. I can't be held accountable for bots or individuals who abuse links on my site. Googles links aren't the only ones that suffer at the hands of third party programs. But they seem to be the only ones who make you pay a consequence for them.