When I launched my blog, obviously told my friends and family about it. I had received 12 clicks total, and from asking around, out of curiosity, these clicks were from friends. So am I screwed?
Ok, what if they really clicked the ads out of interest? How does google distinguish if these were friends or not? BTW, SEOBusiness, nice health blog, wanna exchange links?
Google doesn't really know they are your friends. They just look for repeat clicks from the same IPs over short periods of time. I would ask them not to click the ads unless they are really interested and to space it out.
If any of my friends or family who don't know anything about AdSense ask me, "How do you many money off Ads?" I tell them it's from impressions. I still tell them not to refresh the pages, because they'll do it anyway.
If that's just 12 clicks on 1 day and doesn't happen again, they might not ban you. Tell your friends not to click the ads anymore.
They weren't in one day, but yesterday I had 4 clicks from the same person. :/ again, is it possible to know where the clicks came from?
if you think ur in trouble pro act and contact Google before they ban you And Also don't tell your friends about your adsense unless they will click on it
They're not going to ban you because one person clicked one of your ad's 4 times. If that person clicked it 100 times, then you might receive a warning. There's no way you can know where the clicks came from..so it could be one of your friends, or just some random person who clicked 4 times like an idiot. Either way, Google doesn't know if you're associated with the clicker or not, so tell your acquaintances not to click and then worry about getting some real traffic so you can make some money.
Hope so u won't get banned this time but never ask ur friend or anyone to click because u dunno anything but google knw everything
Then what happened? How did it end? Also, I think I should tell google, but what should I say? What if they read my letter and still banned me? :S Should I say: "I'm suspicious of repeated clicks, please remove them from my status/balance." ??
Google won't know if the clicks were from your friends or from people you know. You'll get banned, though, if many clicks were done on the same day by one person or from one IP address. Tell your friends not to click on the ads anymore, or to do it only say once or twice a week.
I don't think you'll get banned, but IP addresses reveal the location of the click, and if they are all clustered around a certain geographic area it will look suspicious, especially if they came in a short space of time. That is all that Google can tell, but they can make assumptions from this pattern, and it's likely that friends are the explanation for it. Just ask your friends not to click ads in future and tell them if they do it may get you into trouble.