How not to get banned from Adsense and Keep earning! Adsense for a Year!

Hello all DP members. Hope you are doing fine. I am posting again after nearly 6 months. My good friend and adviser James Collins wrote me an inspiring message. So I thought I would share my experience with adsense after using it for a year and yes after receiving 7 checks from Google.

To start with, a year back I was novice in online business and it was more of a fun and learning experience. So I took it way too seriously and dedicated about 8 hours a day every day for content writing, link building, SEO and all. I made a point to update content daily. Earning was really frustrating and I was not enjoying the work. Beside the work, there were threads of account bans flooding across all webmaster's forums including DP.

I than build some strategy and worked towards it. The income is not envious ($135-$220 a month) , but has long been stabilized. Here are some of the myths that people spreads which I have found interestingly misleading.

1. Privacy Policy: Till date I have not included a Privacy policy link with main menu. It is just the usual stuff that is shown at the time of registration. So it certainly is no criteria for getting banned.

2. High CTR: At the beginning, for about 6 months of my AdSense usage, I used to find CTR bellow .5%, which rarely made for any income. for last few months it is over 2% and there was a month when it crossed 6%. I did not really incorporated any changes in the site design or AdSense placement. By the way, in first six months I analyzed the type of Ad units which are getting clicked. I removed all Ad units and stick to two best, big size in the most visible area of the page with 1 link unit like a menu. So variations in CTR can not be an alarm. I sincerely urge new users to stop looking at CTR stats for first six months.

3. Daily content update: I used to update my blog, technical blog and research findings quite regularly, Which I have minimized and some times there are no updates for days , weeks and even for a month. Neither earning varied to great deal, nor I have received any warning from Google.

4. Use of Analytic: I have seen many punters advising against using google chrome or Analytics, but to be honest analytic is the best tool ever made to give you the best insight about website usage. So if and should you want to track web stat, Analytic is the best tool.

5. Alexa and PR: Two of the worst things I have spent my times earlier. For example when I had 2000 UV/Month, Alexa was .2M, now after nearly as much UV a day, it is .8M. So stop being worried about Alexa. Same goes true for PR. some of my pages without any links are at the top of SERP where as some of the top linked pages are lost in 2nd and 3rd pages of SERP. However this may vary from Niche to Niche and I am giving only my understanding.

6. Automated tools: There are several tools for Comment posting, Directory submission and link building. The pages that I used them are the worst hit and hardly ever shown in any search result page. I dont know but probably google has ways of finding out. I have long since stopped using any such tools. Similarly Article submission through Eizene has also not helped. However I have found out some quality authority sites that consumes your RSS feed and section of the site is designed to feed such sites. It has helped our site very well.

7. Copied Content: Trust me on this, the best way to get banned is by copying the content of other sites and putting it in an Adsense page. You can get away with invalid clicks, but non meaningful content and copied content ( Including Images) is the biggest threat to your account.

8. Stop thinking about CPC/CTR when you are new:d Dont invest too much time on these. You cant do anything to change them. Yeah, you simply can not. Ad placement, blending of Ads all will seem useless at times. However some understanding about the best possibility of Ad placement is necessary. Remember the area of a page that attracts more visitor is shown to you by Analytic. use that. Not all the site's header will attract more clicks. So its simple, place the Ads where you as a visitor will have better visibility and forget the rest. chopping and changing Ad placement daily will rarely make any sense.

9. Content is the King:Yes you have heard this million times. But I want to add another thing, write those content that you enjoy writing. If you follow a trend and too much keyword research and all that, you are bound to end up being frustrated. Put everything that you know about your niche and read more to get better insight about what you are writing. Dont count keywords when you write something. Nobody likes to read 'Cycle' 1000 times in an Essay about Cycles. If possible justify your writings with some diagrams ( which you must draw and not downloaded) or excell sheets or Graphs. You can trust me on this.

10. Finally: For me Adsense is now just another project which like others I also prefer to see flying high. But It will never be able to replace your offline earning( I dont know about others, but surely for me). Beside, there are too many factors in AdSense which you can not control. That is a wide gamble. So if you are new and not earning something like $10,000 PM , you should not purely rely on Adsense.

As the company I founded is getting ready to get listed and will be public in a year's time, I hardly get time for participating in forums. I wrote this for New enthusiasts who use Adsense only for earning and manage to get banned quickly.

Here are few more things you may want to take a notice about:

* Never get involved in Online controversies. Withdraw yourself from any extended heated exchange. ( DP has taught me this )
* Enjoy your work
* Keep up link building but no automated link building.
* Dont get lost in statistics
* Always have a goal of what you want to achieve and work wisely towards the goal.
* Make at least one site worthy of AdSense and generate some revenue out of it before going for multiple sites. ( I am using Adsense only in one site for last 4-5 months) as managing other sites is non contextual with new development in my firm.
* No shortcuts. many of Indian and Pakistani publishers have been banned because of their fondness for shortcut method. ( dont pull me into any controversy for the statement. This is my opinion). And if you are an Indian publishers, get away from Blogger's community like Blog adda and Indiblogger if you sincerely do not wish to get banned.

I wish all of you all the best with Adsense! remember US $100 may not be a huge amount, but if you manage that regularly, a years earning is worth 20gm Gold!

 

thanks for your views. I've been in Adsense for 5 years now and I still consider it as a part-time, passive income generator for me only. I'm still working a full time job.

again, I appreciate your takes on this.

 

Yes, I should have suspected it, adsense is a suit too tight for Rupam
Personally my offline earnings amount to $0 so it's not difficult to rely on online earnings
Thank you for taking the time to write this report, that explains why you seemingly "quit" DP and your blog since january.
In a way it's a pity, because if you had put most of your time and effort into online earnings (not only adsense) then your success story would be much more impressive.
But it was to be expected, since you can succeed easily in this online earnings stuff (compared to most people I think) it's normal that you're thinking of success at a much higher level, with grownup/adult tools.

Good luck and enjoy the company stuff

 

James, thanks again to take time and reply. One of the reasons for non participation in DP was , there were too many negative threads about banning and all that which I wanted to and still want to avoid.

I have learnt about online business, especially AdSense and how exactly it works, used that to build Grasshopper Network. Which of course is giving me some payouts every month which with depressing Indian Rupees values, not bad( makes about INR 10,000 to INR 14,000). Further if you consider the low price of living with three decent meals a day costing less than $3, One get paid for most of his living through AdSense.

To add to that figure, the earning from AdSense needs not more than two hours a day or may be less depending upon the nature of the site. However with consistent monitoring of the business I figured out few things which may not be universally true, but is certainly for my case.
1. Adsense follows some patterns. For example for a period, the earning never increased beyond $1.5 a day ( Average).
2. Then suddenly it jumped to about $3.5 a day and then $5-$8 a day
3. Clicks increased from 10 clicks a day to 50 clicks a day with some pattern. Same goes true with traffic. Agreed, the more your site is online, the more authority is stamped by Google.
4. Amount of work that goes to site has no direct relation with the earning.
5. Another terrible fact: with time CTR improves but CPC gets adjusted automatically. So basically if you ( Not you James!) are earning $.25 par click for 10 clicks a day, you would realize that CPC is about $.125 for 20 clicks.
6. So basically I dont have a control over CPC, I do not know how CPC will adjust, I can not predict RPM, CTR, traffic, nature of Ads. I have control over only content and link building. So there are too many parameters that we can not control which makes it tough for a projection of the revenue.

All the businesses needs time to grow and settle down, so does Adsense. There are success stories around for sites which have crossed $10,000 within a year of start, but we take notice of them because they are rare!

So I am keeping my fingers crossed, I dedicate the time that ought to be given. Let it take as much time as it takes. One of the aspects is , when a business is growing, you need to support it economically through reserve sources which pays for site's expanses, advertisement your family,your bills, insurances.

with so many uncertain parameters I could not really made myself to believe that I can quit other businesses for Adsense. somebody else might disagree, different perspective really!

Ground reality is James, I consider my journey through Adsense is in preliminary stage, which is giving some earning that I definitely do not complain about, but at this moment it seems, Adsense is going through some paradigm shift and hope to see it getting stable over the time.

I strongly feel if one can keep the account going for about 17-24 months with regular payouts, the earning takes off. So I am not departing Adsense, working with it as this is some fun, at the same time trying to play around with some 'Adult tools' really

The day, i would stop enjoying either of these, I would quit. Wrote this thread primarily to highlight
1. Adsense takes more time in average than one think to give you stable revenue every month
2. Good sites and publishers do not get banned
3. If one keep working, things improve automatically.
4. Unlike other businesses where more time means more money, Adsense will not show you the proof in the initial period.
5. Backup yourself ( if possible or necessary) with alternative source of income for the initial period.
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I would surely see it though and would certainly write here in DP, how the stuff goes from period 12-18 months and there after!

All the best to all Adsense users.