The Culling

It's meaningless until Google defines it for us. They haven't yet.

It won't be meaningless to anyone whose account is shut down because of it.

"Made for AdSense" (or Google's equivalent language) is like "disorderly conduct": It's purposely vague so that it can be applied when the authorities (in this case, Google) need a reason for nailing someone.

If adsense overlapped your drop-down navigation like the current ad on the right does, could that have been your problem? I tried it on a couple browsers and the advertisement on right prevents me from clicking on your "Links and Contacts" drop down (it drops down behind the advertisement).

I know about that but don't knwo how to fix it. However the adsense ads were never covered up (it is the drop down menu which is covered) therefore the adsense ads were always completely visible as per their TOS.

I know about that but don't knwo how to fix it. However the adsense ads were never covered up (it is the drop down menu which is covered) therefore the adsense ads were always completely visible as per their TOS.

In fact this can be the reason for invalid clicks. People who want to click the drop down menu will not have the menu choices under the focus of their mouse, but the adsense ads. One or more visitors might have clicked the upper adsense ad instead of the menu choice they wanted. Although maybe not intentional, these are invalid clicks, clicks not generated by the visitor to view the ad, but clicks generated because of a technical flaw in the website design.

<added>
Furthermore from the Program policies:

Site Responsiveness
Sites must respond adequately to support requests and enquiries of their users.

By hiding the contacts link behind the adsense ad, it might be difficult, or impossible for users to send support requests and enquiries to you.
</added>

What lammert stated. I believe that one of the reasons your site/account was killed off was the navigation dropping down behind AdSense so people had very little choice but to click ads when trying to navigate your site....

If that was the reason so be it. Altough consdiering the peopel can move freely aroudn the site EXCEPT for "links and contacts" then I would have thought that they would have e-mailed me first to say, get this sorted rather than telling me I had invalid clicks. The strange thing is that I have just looked at the site on firefox and it works perfectly. Anyway, who cares now. Moved on - just responding to questions.

blairsp: if I go to your site and look at something it gives me a link to a "more info" page at another site. That other site has adsense, and some parts of the text descriptions are shared. Could that be part of it?

It sucks to have to wonder about all these little things. I personally got kicked out of adsense the other day, and have since been mulling over different little site details and could they have possibly been the reason...
I have no idea.
Whatever the reason is/was (and I assure you it is nothing obvious), I would have gladly changed it immediately if they had just told me to.

How were you getting traffic to your site? You said that keyword domains made up only a small % of your income, so for the main part did you rely on free SE listings, funneling traffic from other websites, AdWords or other forms of advertising, spyware, popunders, email marketing or what?

if I go to your site and look at something it gives me a link to a "more info" page at another site. That other site has adsense, and some parts of the text descriptions are shared. Could that be part of it?

no that is a straightforward link exchange.

I truely appreciate all the suggestions and the PM's but I have moved on and we won't get a definitive answer from the G team anyway (I tried long and hard).

suzyvirtual, how much did you lose from your February earnings when they kicked you out? I was around $1800 for February when they pulled the plug.

I wish AdSense would cull their publishers list. I was just now doing searches so to look at all of those who have ripped off portions of my content. The vast majority were made for Adsense scraper sites.

The whole reason I came over to WebMasterWorld just now was to read through things so to see if there was any new information about the new Yahoo Adsense program. If the Yahoo program was in service and I was under the impression that they actually had some standards for sites I would switch 100% of my traffic to them just on principle.

Adsense initially was the way to "take the high road" with a site and it's advertising. Now the way Adsense is used it's pretty obvious that the only thing that matters to Google is the cash (so much for that "do no evil" thing). Whether the Adsense ads are found on original content sites that actually contribute to the quality of the web or scraper sites, its all just a click through to Google.

joma#*$!, were you asking me? I think you were--
My traffic mas a mix of regular SE traffic (msn and yahoo mostly) and traffic from links (legitimate, topical) on others websites.

Thx. The reason I asked is that there have been a few cases where overly enthusiastic attempts to juice up one's impressions (e.g. "buying clicks") appeared to be the reason for getting kicked out.

jomaxx, could you elaborate on "buying clicks"? This really doesn't affect me, but I am wondering this: Since literally clicks would obviously be click fraud, I assume you mean buying impressions/traffic. Isn't that called advertising? What's the problem there?

There are places where you can supposedly buy clicks to your site for very low amounts of money (say, 1c a click or less). The visitors are due to popunders, spyware, unusable 3rd world traffic, and other dubious sources. The economics look very attractive until you factor in the cost of a lifetime ban from Google.

I think jomaxx is talking about the guys I see selling "3k clicks for 7.99" in online auctions.

I expect you'll get what you pay for...

Hello,

I have been wondering when I hear you talk of scraper sites..would this be considered a scraper site?

I feel it has good content!

Thank You

Jeff