Account Disabled after huge increase in traffic

What should I do?

[rlkanter]

Last week I increased a lot of content on my website and got noticed by some bigger sites in my field. This increased the traffic I was receive almost 4x it's normal rate, and it has maintained about 2x normal since then. Today I received 4 emails within an hour from google saying my account was disabled for invalid clicks. I replied to one of the emails but simply received a form reply saying that they re-reviewed my account data and that it would remain disabled. They said they won't elaborate further because of the "proprietary nature of our monitoring system". I'm guessing the increased traffic had something to do with the account being disabled.

Are there any suggestions? Should I start looking for a new ad provider (any suggestions for good one for a content site)? I'd really like to stay with google, I've been with them for about 5 months without any trouble. I have never clicked on my own ads except maybe once or twice when I first started using adsense.

Thanks.

[irock]

Rodney,

Either your logic is flawed, or there's something I don't understand. Assuming people click on your ads frequently, how can Google convict you of a fraud given the website didn't encourage people to click?

What really scares me is that rlkanter was getting 15k clicks a month before the spike... 15k clicks a month or 500 clicks a day is a lot. It would seem Google doesn't care if you are a medium or a large site... if you are even detected of an unusal activity, you are automatically put on blindfold and hang. No appeal necessary on Google part.

[Rodney]

Either your logic is flawed, or there's something I don't understand. Assuming people click on your ads frequently, how can Google convict you of a fraud given the website didn't encourage people to click?

It's quite possible my logic is flawed :)

However, google doesn't really need to "convict" you. If they see possible fraudulent activity, they can remove you from their program.

From reading his message, he sounds like he did enourage some of the people that he told about his website to click the ads, just not very often.

Not that google would know this, but perhaps the people he told about his website are from the same area (maybe college IP) or just clicked so often that it seemed pretty clear it was some sort of repeated, fraudulent click effort (maybe based on the traffic patterns of those people browsing the site).

It's all very speculative.

[irock]

rlkanter,

I guess you can tell us what click-thru rate during HUGE traffic days. How does it compare to the NORMAL days?

[PatrickDeese]

You might want to consider that "fraudulent clicks" is a broad category and doesn't necessarily mean only self-clicked ads.

For instance, someone posted about being booted from the program once - but in their case they had been displaying Adsense in a frame populated with $XX keywords that was displayed above the real content that had nothing to do with the keywords in the frame.

He was notified that his account was cancelled for invalid clicks as well - not saying that's the case here - but just keep that in mind.

[rlkanter]

From reading his message, he sounds like he did enourage some of the people that he told about his website to click the ads, just not very often.

Well I didn't ask them to click, it was more that I told to make sure they didn't click too often (I wanted to make sure they didn't click to help me out). I talked to two of them last night, and they hadn't visited the site in about a month, and didn't click very often. Even assuming there were one or two clicks every month from the same people thats about 0.05% of the total clicks. I'm not sure how I could prevent that. Even normal visitors might click more often than that.

I guess you can tell us what click-thru rate during HUGE traffic days. How does it compare to the NORMAL days?

The CTR % on the huge traffic days was about 30% higher then normal for a weekday (my CTR is lower on weekends for whatever reason). As far as actual clicks last week on huge traffic days vs a normal weekday, it was about 5.5x normal.

[irock]

I have a strong feeling that someone has a bot on you.

[Visi]

Don't think the spike in visitors and the increase in the number of clicks is the driving force here. We have a site that cycles through highs and lows based on current events and do not have a problem. I am not sure in re-reading whether you also had an significant increase in effective click through rates? If you did this would most likely be the cause. A site that has 5-6 months of activity at one rate that suddenly jumps (with no changes in ads being served) would raise the flags for sure.

[rlkanter]

I have a strong feeling that someone has a bot on you.

It might have been something like that. Unfortunately it looks like this is the end of the story.

I received what I believe was a non-form response this evening saying that they wouldn't tell me what specifically caused the disabling of my account, but that they had checked again, and the issue was closed. They re-iterated googles ability to terminate anyones account at will.

Oh well, time to find another ad provider.