I got an email from Google saying that they were disabling Adsense on one of my sites because I was "diguising" the ads under "misleading" headers. They did not cancel my account, but rather stopped displaying ads on that one site. The ads were placed on a link directory I run, and one of the banner ads seperated the featured links from the standard links. The featured links were under the H3 header "Featured Links" and the standard links were uner the h3 header "Free Links". The Google ads appeared directly above the "Free links header, and any "Featured Links" appeared above the Google ads. The google ads look nothing like the directory listings (not even remotely close), and I did nothing to draw attention to the ads. After getting the email that they would no longer be displaying ads for my site, I added an H3 header "Advetisements" to more clearly seperate the ads from the listings and sent a letter apologizing. I asked if my changes were adequate to be reinstated. They replied with "please be aware that because your site was found to be in violation of our program policies, it is no longer eligible for participation in the AdSense program." The site had been using adsense in this exact same manner for 4 or 5 years. WTF??? So, just because one reviewer at Google interprets the rules differently than the others, my site is no longer allowed to show ads? No review process or appeal? That's crap. Time to start evaluating MSN and Yahoo I guess.
always wise to not place all your eggs into one basket. But yes, pretty much, one strike and you are out with Google. They are really strict. I mean seriously strict. I imagine you can appeal, but I don't personally know how to go about that. Sorry.
Yup, like paganheart said, just one strike Can you post a screenshot of what the site looked like so we don't fall into the same mistake? Doesn't sound like there would've been much of a problem to me if I understood how you described it right
It's also possible that nobody from Google actually visited your site for the last 4-5 years. Only now. With billions of webpages hosting adsense, the humans may have a lot of backlogs in their hands. And if they do manually check sites, probably they'll just pick one unlucky site from random sampling. By the way, were you earning a lot from that site?
the site is ndthunder<dot>com. Its crap. It was one of my first sites. Some may disagree, but I've progressed since then. You can tell where ads are supposed to be because there is now a header that says "Advertisements" with nothing under it. To imagine what it looked like when it got kicked out of Adsense, simply imagine an adsense ad there and ignore the header. No, it didn't earn a lot from adsense. Directories never do.
I don't see a privacy policy link... it might've been that? Don't know if they ban people for that though