Thanks for your advice.... I am not banned yet and frankly if I need to do all of that I will look for an alternative... I have provided their advertisers site space for three years without an issue. The link farm I can understand. But not the webrings. I run a WebRing with over 260 users. It provides value to new bloggers and sites that want to get extra site exposure for their work. It drives mutual exposure for everyone in the ring. It costs everyone NOTHING. Frankly... Google and company are not very OpenWeb and OpenSource oriented are they? Their monopolistic overtones franky turn me off ala Microsoft. Thanks for your suggestion though... If you are correct, then so be it. We shall see. Personally I think they are changing their corporate strategy to "follow the money up the curve" and carve out a niche with the largest and biggest sites on the high end because their competitors at the low end are taking some market share away. They prefer to work with the mega sites because their customers want that! They can charge higher fees on AdWords if the sites their customer's ads are directed to are targeted to the HIGH end of the spectrum if you get my drift. The customer wants exposure on sites that have lots of eyeballs and highly targeted audience to maximize the probability of PURCHASE by their end user. The nice thing is that the CUSTOMER is king and the CUSTOMER has choice. Certainly this one has. There are alternatives to AdSense. I will make some changes that I am comfortable making and the rest is up to their bots I suppose. Again thanks...
If your webring adds value, then I would guess it is okay by Google. They are simply trying to draw a line between value-add links and links meant to manipulate results. In any case, glad to hear you are not banned yet!
Well, got my reply back from Google on my appeal. So I guess thats that then. Reply as follows: Thank you for your appeal. After receiving your response, we re-reviewed your account data thoroughly. We have reconfirmed that invalid clicks were generated on the ads on your site in violation of our Terms and Conditions and program policies. We have these policies in place to help ensure the effectiveness of Google ads for our publishers as well as our advertisers. According to our policy on this matter, we are unable to reinstate you into the program. As you may know, publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed any further participation in AdSense. For this reason, you may not open a new account. Please bear in mind that subsequent or duplicate appeals may not be considered and you may not receive any further communication from us. We appreciate your understanding. Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team
I'm really sorry this happened on your account!!! I guess my next question is what all consititutes as "invalid clicks"? I know of others who've been banned and have not clicked on their own links. Maybe these link exchanges and certain sites have something to do with it. It's getting a bit scarry - it's like you've really got to be careful of the sites that you're linking to and sites that are linking to you. Seems a lot a chaos and no easy solutions. Keep your head up and move on! You've got to. Search and find alternatives for now until you can figure out your next move! Good luck!
Well they hit my account so all is gone. I am moving on, running adbrite, getting nothing like what I was but oh well. I made in the past 2 weeks on AdWords that I would make an hour with adsense. Guess I just need to hang in there.
This has happened to me in the past. Keep emailing them a reply from the original email with your incident # until a human being responds. Email once a week.
Yeah that's the standard (automated ??) reply I got after sending my appeal too. Although I did end up getting a cheque come through a few weeks later for the earnings up until just before they banned me. Surely they should think (assuming they actually bothered to look at my appeal) that if everything I had earned on the months up to that point was considered valid, why would I suddenly start doing "invalid clicks" as they claim?
Just as a small note. Although I am banned they did pay me for what they owed me from the previous month. Don't know if that is normal or if I should expect anything from this month but though I would let you all know.
Well, the first one in your sig has pictures next to the ads and no line between them and the ads. That would be in violation of the TOS. On the second one: you are telling your visitors to click on the ads. That too is in violation of the TOS.
If he hasn't done anything wrong then he should fight his case and give himself a glimmer of hope that his account will be reinstated.
So is it a bad thing to link together with all my sites ??? i have like 50. 40 of them super related.., i was planing on linking to all the ones on 6 different servers like sites on server A link to sites B and C . Server C sites link to sites on A and B ettcc.. ?? is that bad ?
of course i got banned for having a friend design a program to use all my colleges computers to randomly click the ads through different proxy's... you can't fool google..