Rollo - 8:55 pm on Oct 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

No, I mean to say that the site was fully functional and receiving traffic and making adsense revenue since 2004, then I decided to change the theme and took it down, but left the domain up about 12 html pages with a bit of content so the domain would remain viable in the search engines and not have to re-escpape the sandbox.

I left the Google ads up on a couple pages that had little to no content that were previously gateways to the php section. This was an oversite, beucase I have a lot of sites and didn't pay much attention to it. It was a coincidence that it was this time that Google blocked the ads or maybe someone wanted to see why all the ad revenue had dropped off. I can only speculate.

It was about the extact same time that I noticed the 403s. I didn't think anything of it at the time as Adsense hadn't been an important part of my business up to then.

I did not leave the couple Google ads up to rob advertisers as joeking so unkindly accused me of. The ads still matched the content of the overall site so if there were a few clicks during these few days, they were on-topic and hardly watsted. I mean, noone put a gun to anyone's head and forced them to click or tricked them in any way. The ads were the old fashioned sort with the neon blue borders. Secondly, it was only a couple days before the 403s arrived. I don't know about him, but it would not occur to me to commit an act of theft over a few lousy dollars.

I then proceeded to build the new site and didn't look at the old domain for months, I was expecting to spend a month or two developing the new site but it ended up taking 6. I launched it a couple days ago and at that time I realized that Google must be blocking it becuase the ads were displaying fine on our test site...

I hope this fills out the circumstances a bit.

[edited by: Rollo at 9:01 pm (utc) on Oct. 5, 2006]