Hi, Am I getting banned because some of my users had added my site to their favourites and they are using the search box in a regular basis. I have removed all the adsense ads from that site and left the search utility. Is it risky that I am getting some clicks from the same IP addresses when useres perform google searches? Need your advice.
It's a small local community site. I don't track the IPs, I just got feedback from few users telling me that they love surfing my site everyday and some said that they love the search tool and that they are using it on regular basis.
Tracking IP can be done using addfreestats.com , but people using your search box instead of google is confusing.
I have no answer to that. Shall I tell them it's better for you to use google!!! What's the point of having the adsense for search on my site if people don't use it?Shall I just remove it and place a link to goolge.co.uk?
Yep, if u think people are repeatedly comming back and searching then i think its risky. I won't risk my adsense account.
amitpatel: thx for the advice. I'll remove the box too before I got banned. I'd better use adsense on my other sites.
Until and unless you are not directing your users to search using the google search or to click on your ads you wont get banned. People coming back and searching is not a big issue if the traffic is legit. It's easy! All you have to do is create an .htaccess file in the directory you'd like to restrict (your main directory to restrict the entire site) and then put the following in it: <Limit GET> order allow,deny allow from all deny from 123.142.124.152 deny from 124.24. </LIMIT> You can put whole ips or just the beginning part you'd like to match, and you can add more and more ips, each with its own line! When somebody's ip is banned, they will get a 403 error (access forbidden) when trying to visit your site.
I think Google give us the searchbox facility so that people do use it. If they didn't want people to use it surely they wouldn't give us the facility in the first place. If it a community site that people repeatedly use then I think its fine.
I don't understand what the problem is here... as long as the website is not soliciting clicks or encouraging users to use their search bar instead of the official Google one there is no violation of the TOS. This is the perfect scenario for a webmaster! Actually having people use your search bar regularly... would provide a nice steady income
Hi Pardon, I agree with many others in this thread - if your visitors are legitimately using the search function on your site, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. Especially for a "community site", where users visit frequently and spend some time, I think it makes perfect sense that they would simply use the search function on your site when they want to search for something (assuming they're already there), rather than go to the trouble of going to the Google site. Just my two cents... Sam
I also have the same situation, ask Google, and they say OK, ppl using my search box everyday, I have a cybercafe, I put my page as a startup page on every PC, 30 of them, no worries as long as you can provide them with backlog of the users, note that i'm using squid in my local server and that provides me detail backlogs on usage.
They also said, they have better advanced technology in detecting invalid clicks, as long as we continue to work as a team with them .