The Culling

Aggressive Banning Policies?

[Firemile]

In the last 15 days the following WebmasterWorld have been banned from adsense:

forsakenlad
suzyvirtual
teeceo
blairsp
liestol
dcmginc
chullanz

(Please note that 1 of these members clicked his own ads and the other ran a scrapper site. This is not a post concerning IF they should of been banned, but WHY they have been)

This shows a dramatic increase in the number of bannings reported to WebmasterWorld and therefore hints at a general increase in bannings by the adsense team.

Could this be a new strategy of culling the publisher herd, leaving only high quality publishers?

Could this be a strategy to combat Yahoo by making please advertisiers currently frustrated by their ads showing on crap and scrap sites?

I don't have any answers, but I thought I'd put the theory out there.

[Sense_able]

Well if this culling is the clearing out of the scrapper sites then good riddance

If however any of the people on the list are hard working webmasters with content sites then I am really sorry for you and I urge you to strike up a communication with Adsense and plead your case.

Scrapper sites have killed my google ranking, cut my revenue and the sooner they are dumped the better.....

[level80]

By scrapper do you mean scraper?

[ownerrim]

either that or crapper

[ecahoon]

You can add me to the list - got my notification last night.

I take it as a possitive event - time for me to look at alternatives to Google AdSense.

See ya Google!

[incrediBILL]

They are dropping like flies.

I'm afraid to check my email.

[Sense_able]

If you have content and are too busy building pages to click on anything then you should be safe

[Atomic]

Wow, a made for AdSense site that has irritated me for months because it's been draining advertising in one of my areas is gone. Maybe they are going through complaints and slowly but surely removing the ones that treaded the line.

Good riddance.

[leveldisc]

What is 'made for adsense' anyway?

Any page with adsense on could be made for adsense.

[lammert]

Is there a connection with the late "payment approved" anouncement? It looks like Google first wants to clean up their publishers list before approving the payments.

[Atomic]

Any page with adsense on could be made for adsense.

You know it when you see it. There is almost nothing on the page but AdSense. When a website is nothing but a frame to hold AdSense and has no real content besides the ad I think I could easily say that that site had been created to show AdSense ads. Perhaps once in a while a template will accidently spit out a page that could fit this it's something else again when it's an entire website.

[dcmginc]

Firemile, someone mentioned in a previous post that the end of March is G's year-end. Their post had to do with the HUGE drop in earnings that a large amount of users are going through. A theory I had is that it might be possible that they're shutting accounts down to help increase the revenue even more. I know there are some on this site that believe G refunds money to advertisers. As an Adwords spender doing about 15K a year I have yet to see any refunds of significant $$$.

Of course the other side of the coin is that I'm just cranky over my lost $$$ from Adsense. I'd like to know the reason for the closing of my account, but as of today I still haven't bothered to email them back. I know getting the canned reply saying they can't tell me their secrets will only light the fire under my a** even more then it already is.

[blairsp]

I know getting the canned reply saying they can't tell me their secrets

you forgot the word "repeatedly" because you will almost certainly get the same one over and over again no matter what your question is.

[howiejs]

What is the highest earning publisher that was knocked out? Are these small earners or previous UPS club $10k + a month?

[bendee]

Of course the biggest google garbage sites are never gonna get dropped. I'm talking about the domain parkers, which generate a lot of traffic and have no content at all.

[dcmginc]

howiejs, My February earnings were $2K which was down from a peak of $3K months earlier. The last time I looked at my account (about a day or two prior to the boot) I was only at $350 for March.

[howiejs]

"dcmginc" - something must have happened to your traffic?

you went from $2k - $3k a month to $350 for a month

90% drop?

was this due to a traffic drop or something else?

We all appreciate your feedback as it helps everyone here learn.

[dcmginc]

howiejs, of course I can't see any of this now that the account is gone, but what I last saw was a drop around the 11th of March. Most of the $350 came in by the 11th. You could see a huge drop in the earnings after that. The clicks and traffic were consistent to what I had been experiencing for 15 months (even during the 3K months in 2004).

Since my first post after the boot I think I may have the answer to why I lost my account. My main site is a forum and the Adsense ads appeared site-wide in the header. Which means they appeared on the pages that came up after a user posted a message. If this is the problem (and i'm sure it is the problem) then I'd have to say that my oversight on the TOS was an expensive lesson.

I would have thought that after 15 months no other problems they would have treated this as a warning offense. I would have fixed the problem in a heart beat if given the chance. Oh well... live and learn :)

[dcmginc]

by the way Howie... I went from 3K to 2K and then March with $350.

I wanted to clear that up so that no one gets the idea that it was a spike in the upward direction. It was a continous decline in earnings since about last summer.

[totter]

I would love to see a directory of sites dropped by adsense. I think it would be inspirational for everyone.

It's my theory that if you have content that's original then there is no way you will be dropped from the program.

[gunface]

I would also love to see some of the sites that have been dropped.

I think when there is a red flag being raised, Google's review of your site might often be the determining factor of whether or not you'll be kicked out...

[blairsp]

It's my theory that if you have content that's original then there is no way you will be dropped from the program.

another urban myth in the making.I had 200+ pages of original content - travel articles written by myself including pictures as part of the page (not the whole page). 200 pages not enough?

[Rosalind]

Blairsp, did the advert for MSN appear before or after you got booted from Adsense?

[The Contractor]

blairsp, if it's the site in your profile did the AdSense ads occupy where the advertisement is on the right? If not what ad style/format did you use and where was it placed?

[Atomic]

I just don't know about having your website's URL in your profile here. It almost invites someone to visit and start clicking...

[blairsp]

That is only part of the site (the articles pages were moved to a different url) but to all intents and purposes yes that was the site. The layout was left column - skyscraper ad (normally cpm), middle protion was content, adsense were in right hand column, no adverts across top.

[blairsp]

Hi Atomic

I just don't know about having your website's URL in your profile here. It almost invites someone to visit and start clicking...

that doesn't concern me anymore :] but I know what you mean.

[blairsp]

Blairsp, did the advert for MSN appear before or after you got booted from Adsense?

think that must have been a simple cpm banner, it certainly isn't cpc etc

[HughMungus]

What is 'made for adsense' anyway?

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

[The Contractor]

The layout was left column - skyscraper ad (normally cpm), middle protion was content, adsense were in right hand column, no adverts across top.

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).