For a long time there have been the "I've been banned for no reason" by kids who acculated almost $80 by clicking on their own ads posts. Now there have been a few "we had $10,000 in our Adsense account and got banned" posts. I find this group hard to believe as they claim to be ligit and if they are then Google is also cutting off a click income stream themselves (if the banned was getting $10,000, G was making at least $5000 per month from their traffic). So do you believe the banned?
some may get sabotaged , true,, but the majority or 99.9% of all these banned protests are a direct result of trying to stuff their pockets with fraudulent clicks. I used to think that adsense would ban you for violating any of their tos , but I spoke with someone thursday who had violated the tos with a non content site ( although against tos ) they were just told to add content or remove adsense. The likely issue facing spam sites / BHatters is just a drop from indexes, not banning from adsense.. SO I do believe that 99.9% of all of the people whining that "Google just happen to wake up this morning and ban their adsense account for no reason" to be totally false and pitiful. How simple is it? Dont click on your own damn ads,, dont tell your friends about your sites that have adsense on them, dont post your adsense sites on your sig if your pissing people off, dont click on your own ads, dont pay people to click on your ads, dont go to the library or get on a school pc and click on your own ads,, oh yeah... Dont click on your own ads. Its really pretty damn simple,, if you missed the point read the paragraph above this one And to all you TOS violators, stop coming in here whining that you got banned for something that you knew would get you banned,,, and do not come in here claiming you didnt know about it,, because if you knew to come here and post that you did get banned then their is no reason that you missed the hundreds of daily webmasters in here telling people and reitterating what gets you banned. I guess I just get tired of hearing all these "woah is me" fairy tales of google banning you for legitly <--- may not be a word)) making them and their shareholders money.
millst2's observations are accurate. They eventually admit that they (and kids from their schoolbus) click on their own ads. But they always have a great plan to get their dad to sign up for them once the account mom set up is banned. Google is not only cutting off the banned person's revenue, they are also cutting off some revenue for themselves. We sell clicks to them at wholesale and they turn around and sell them at retail. I am sure they'd like as big a flow of clicks as they can get but they do need to get the true fraud out.
My thoughts are it doesn't really matter where the fraud is coming from, they don't have to put up with it. If you run a good site and dont do anythign shifty, you really have little risk of getting pinned. IMO, I dont really care why people get banned. Running a realy business means you take responsibility for your business, event he items out of your control. I dont presonally advertise my sites on the forums, for multiple reasons I like to keep my advertising sites private.
I take everything in those posts with a sack of salt. Most of those stories are due to some ToS violation or cheating in some way or another. Unfortunately it seems that these "horror tales" are too easily believed by new webmasters just starting out. Just because it's on the Internet doesn't necessarily mean it's true!
Well I've just been banned from adsense. Fairly early on as well. I can definately see why they'd be suspicious but I honestly haven't done a thing to violate their TOS (I've emailed them asking for a specific reason why my account was disabled because the list of reasons they provided didn't apply to me at all) At times I'd noticed my CTR had been high (in some cases ridiculously high) but all in all, it averaged out at the end of the day at about 10%-11%. I'm not going to say that 100% of all clicks where by people who were interested, but I definately haven't been telling anyone to click, or encouraging users to click on my site*, or modifying code e.t.c. *The only two mentions of adsense on my site are A. This site is supported by adsense and donations B. and a post in the forums I made when I put them on the site saying they were up and should be returning contextual results fairly soon. I'm hoping I'll at least get an email back about why they disabled my account. Before anyone jumps on me, I'm not accusing or suggesting google sabotage accounts or do anything evil. I'm just suggesting that prehaps they make mistakes. Which I think they've done in my case.
Well what do you do if some random guy decides to click on your ad 500 times and gets you banned.... Even though you never did anything.....
Google would easily catch that, they'd stop counting clicks from the same IP after a few clicks. They are a lot smarter than the average dumb saboteur.