How I Got Banned then Unbanned From Adsense

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 reason

These 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.