As you can see, I no longer use Google Adsense on this site anymore. There are multiple reasons including the fact that they make the reader experience worse by providing annoying ads, the fact that in most cases they are an eye-sore and poorly designed, and also by the fact that they took up too much space in my old design (especially in the sidebars), and only earnt me $10 or so each month.
So after this new theme was relaunched at the beginning of May, I’ve hardly been checking my Adsense account. So, when I tried to login a few days ago, I was shocked to see that Google wasn’t letting me in.
Now, the Adsense account is linked to my mother’s name as I’m not yet 18 years old, so I checked her email, and was horrified to see the following email:
Subject: Google Adsense Account Disabled
It has come to our attention that invalid clicks and/or impressions
have been generated on the Google ads displayed on your site(s).
Therefore, we have disabled your Google AdSense account. Please
understand that this was a necessary step in order to protect the
interest of the AdWords advertisers.A publisher’s site may not have invalid clicks or impressions on any
ad(s), including but not limited to clicks and/or impressions generated
by:- a publisher on his own webpages
- a publisher encouraging others to click on his ads
- automated clicking programmes or any other deceptive software
- a publisher altering any portion of the ad code or changing the
layout, behaviour, targeting or delivery of ads for any reasonThese or any other such activities that violate Google AdSense Terms
and Conditions and programme polices may have led us to disable your
account.
OK, this really got my back up. I for one have hardly ever clicked on my own ads, and if I did, have immediately reported it to Google or a representative to warn them of invalid clicks. Therefore, I really was annoyed to have seen the back of my account, also due to the fact that there was still $40 left in there that I was being owed (I suppose that’s not a great deal for some, but £20 can get you a long way!).
Anyhoo, I immediately contested the decision (for those who are in a similar situation the link to contesting is here) to see whether my account could be reinstated. Within 24 hours, another Google rep had sent the following email:
Thank you for your email. As you know, Google treats instances of invalid
clicks very seriously. By disabling your account, we feel that we have
taken the necessary measures to ensure that invalid clicks will not
continue to occur on your site. Due to the proprietary nature of our
monitoring system, we are not able to disclose any specific details of
these clicks.
Short but sweet. I knew my battle was over. So it came as an immense surprise as I was writing this post to try and login to my account to find that I was able to do so with my $40 given back to me! Very strange, my emailing must have hit a G-Nerve somewhere! It seems by looking at a report, that a Blogger site that has been dormant for a year now, got around 20 clicks in 1 day - probably by some unscrupulous visitor/bot.
Anyway, morals of the story: don’t just rely on Adsense for your online income. Diversify your streams of income so that if one goes caput, you’ve still got others that will keep your pocket money or rent pay coming in monthly.
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17 responses so far ↓
1 Matt Propst // May 17, 2007 at 1:04 am
That’s a shame to hear man. AdSense has a way of putting people into bind quite a bit. Be diverse, but don’t break the AdSense TOS. AdSense if big in making money online, but don’t depend on it…. but then again it’s literally one of a bloggers best assets for making money.
I dunno i’m very skeptical myself about how they determine what violates their TOS. Best of luck on the money making journey!
2 Court // May 17, 2007 at 2:44 am
That is a shame! I clicked on my own ad a few weeks ago and got a little scared. Luckily I get a lot of impressions and I think they’re a little more lenient that way.
3 Joseph // May 17, 2007 at 6:45 am
Yeah, sorry to hear that, just move on
4 adnan // May 17, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Hey thanks guys - fortunately I did get my account back, but I’m earning peanuts now anyway so it really doesn’t matter. It definitely goes to show though, that Google isn’t the be all and end all of online monetization.
5 sarahG // May 17, 2007 at 9:54 pm
A couple of years ago my housemate had his suspended with $300+ in there. His site had suddenly gotten indexed soon after Christmas and with info and links for computer shopping it become popular very quickly. Google clearly saw this to mean invalid clicks, despite them being the ones that sent the hundreds of daily visitors!
It took him a week and the offering of raw log files, and his computer information for them to finally disable it, all money still intact.
The day that happened I did a lot of research trying to help him and discovered so many others in a similar place. A good site I came across was http://www.iambanned.com/.
Glad to hear you got your account unlocked however. AdSense goes up and down, right now for us it’s on the up so I’m not going to complain too much!
6 adnan // May 19, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Wow that is really bad - I’m lucky I only make peanuts from Adsense for it not to mean much to me. I suppose its the medium earners who are at most risk: the small guys don’t make that much anyway, and the big fish are in contact with representatives anyway so they can never get banned.
But cheers for dropping by and sharing that story - there’s a lot like that eg. Paypal - Paypalsucks.com!
7 ChrisJ // May 20, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I’ve been involved with Adsense for around 3 months now and got banned in the first month. I still have no idea why. Fortunately, they have reinstated my account, but I’m still not getting near the traffic I need to monetize the site. I’ve looked at serveral other means of income and still trying to find the right ones.
I totally agree that we must all find ofher means of revenue. Because you never know when Adsense will bring the hatchet down!
8 Izwan // Jul 7, 2007 at 10:14 am
One thing I am certain about this blog is that although it doesn’t have any AdSense ads after this, you will figure another way to monetize this blog.
Good luck!
9 adnan // Jul 7, 2007 at 11:04 am
Hey Izwan - lol yeah the whole reason why I scrapped Adsense on this blog, was that they were a poor earner anyway. Private Ad Deals have become my bread and butter and perform really well these days.
Thanks for dropping by.
10 SEO Blog // Jul 30, 2007 at 9:27 am
Thats good to hear about you getting your Adsense account back, but you didn’t mention that in your post in detail. I think this ban could have been sue to the fact that your site got a lot of visitors through some social bookmark network like Digg and G detected it an invalid traffic or clicks :s
11 SEO Blog // Jul 30, 2007 at 9:32 am
Hi Adnan, btw did you get your $40 from Adsense when your account was unbanned, or were they lost?
12 adnan // Jul 30, 2007 at 10:28 am
Hey Rosie - yeah sorry that information wasn’t explicit. I’m not sure how I got the ban. More likely it was due to one person who just kept clicking on the ads. I’m pretty sure they knew what they were doing as well!
And yeah, I got my $40 back from Google when they reinstated by account which was pretty fortunate, as I’ve heard of horror stories where people lose $1000’s!
13 john // Sep 12, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I 100% agree that u should not depend upon a single source of online income. Diversification of incomes and diversification of niches for a stable long term success is a must.
14 anggi krisna // Jun 11, 2008 at 12:40 am
adnan, lucky you :D.. im still worry if i use adsense in my blog, it will get invalid link.. so i decide not to use for my new blog. coz the traffic follow from social networking and many of user can get something strange
15 Secret Affiliate Code Review // Jun 19, 2008 at 4:18 pm
It happened to me too. I also wrote to Google and after 3 month I got my account back. But I haven’t got my money back (about $500).
So now I want to protect my accoutn when I display ads. Do you now a way to do that?
Thanks
Daniel
16 Wii Boy // Jul 4, 2008 at 9:24 pm
@adnan, is Adsense really that shallow? Surely that would open the floodgates for any one with a gripe or grudge to go about just clicking your ads to death?
17 7 Surprising Reasons Why You Don’t Want To Make The Digg Frontpage | Blog Tips Tools and Views by Blog Bloke // Jul 18, 2008 at 11:12 pm
[...] Although it’s rare nowadays, but Blogtrepreneur even got his adsense account banned. [...]
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