Are websites/blogs that violate ToS, cause a click/visit spike, but remove the material soon after, punished by adsense even if they didnt know it was violated in the first place? A hypothetical to help understand. Say you 'ask people to support your site', and then you remove that 'request', is it possible for adsense to somehow retrieve that information even after you removed it? Cheers
It's likely that when the mediabot (adsense bot) retrieves a page they look for phrases like "support us by clicking ads" and notify a human to make a manual check and keep an internal copy of that page. It's not worth doing and if you do do it you deserve to be banned.
There's no certain answer to that, there might be a domain ban/account ban/warn or completely ignore. If you are a good old publisher, you won't likely to get banned so easily if the mistake was unintentional, and guess the other way around.
It depends on Google I suppose. If they see you doing something against the TOS you will get banned no matter what.
The best way is to contact Google and tell them about the incident. I think they are kind enough to understand you. And as LeoSeo said if you are an old publisher and earning enough money every moth than it will be completely ignored.