I was kicked out because of click fraud

I did not click my own ads

[ifly]

I did not ask visitors to click the ads.
I am in China.My average CTR was above 4%.I just checked my adsense statistics a few hours before I received the Email from google which informed me of click fraud,and the stats was NORMAL at that time.

Was the CTR too high,even they were valid clicks?

My check for Feb is above 2k,will it be cleared?

My earning of March is about 1k,will I receive the check?

Last and most important,will it have some good to email google?Is there any chance for me to reinstate my account?

Thanks,and sorry for my poor English ^_^

[suzyvirtual]

I wish I knew other people it had happened to because then we could start a support group...
it is a special kind of anxiety that plagues me heavily still...
For instance while inside my adsense account, checking my stats, every single link that i click gives my a teeny tiny little heart attack becasue the association of "clicking" and "adsense" and having no idea what happened in the first place triggers some kind of internal fear mechanism. The same thing often happens when clicking "adsense" titled threads around here...
Maybe I should use my adsense checks to seek professional help. hehe.

[suzyvirtual]

By the way. To the original poster. I got kicked out on March 23rd and the February checks were sent out a day or a couple days after that. I did recieve my February check and that was before they reinstated my account. I also received my March earnings up until the time I was kicked out, although by the time the March checks were sent, my account had been reinstated for a couple of weeks.
I have no idea if this is "normal" or if it had to do with the specifics of my case. But, there is (may be?) hope...

[ptah]

I was kicked off of AdSense after being part of their program for over a year, because of "invalid clicks."

My CTR was about 1%, and I recieved about 70,000-100,000 impressions a day. I had an unusually high month last month because I put ads on a site that I had been running for along time but neglected to put on, generating about $5000 in revenue, with previous months being between $1500-$3000.

My account has been "suspended", and after emailing Google AdSense I have not received a reply.

My main question is, why would they do this? I'm located in Canada, and not any third world country and my site is quite respectable. Is there any way that I can get my account reinstated.

Also, I was wondering if anyone knew any decent alternatives to Google AdSense that don't have such nazi-like policies?

[ByronM]

I would just give them a call and voice your concerns.

Your new site that you added may not have passed the requirements to enter the program.

[ptah]

I can't find any number to contact, if I did I would phone up and give them a call.

[ByronM]

Good luck..

I don't like this behavior either. Too many unknowns. I wonder how they treat there premium partners?

[jomaxx]

"Invalid clicks" is an umbrella term that can also refer to any violation of the Terms of Service, or to the way the traffic was generated -- say, due to spyware or blind clicks or some other not-in-good-faith method.

[ptah]

Our site(s) do not contain, or distribute any type of spyware.

As you can see, my site is [removed] which doesn't really contain anything offending.

In the past google has been good about informing us when there was problems with our site, and we corrected them and informed them of doing so.

[edited by: ptah at 11:48 pm (utc) on May 3, 2005]

[jahfingers]

Your page has "Advertisment - Ads by Google" above your ad... adsense tos says not to label with anything but "sponsored links" or "advertisements."

Perhaps their reasoning for invalid clicks.

[ptah]

Where do you see that? Both of my sites just contained the code from Google AdSense site.

[sailorjwd]

on your //home. page

[incrediBILL]

Read this ptah, maybe you'll find a gem to use....

SuzyVirtual was both booted AND re-instated after they determined she didn't do the clicking.
[webmasterworld.com...]

[jomaxx]

I saw the same thing. "Advertisment - Ads by Google." On home.yoursite.net. Not strictly one of the wordings Google endorses, but the difference is fairly trivial and I can't really imagine them kicking someone out for this.

[ptah]

I've had that "Advertisement - Ad's by Google" on <snip> for almost a year, so I don't see that being the problem.

[edited by: Jenstar at 4:17 am (utc) on May 4, 2005]
[edit reason] Please remember, no URLs as per TOS [/edit]

[clearvision]

Naive Question: How do people find your site if you don't have anyone linking to you? Or am I looking at the wrong site?

To get as many page views and visits to the site without having one noticeable backlink may be what is concerning Google...just a shot in the dark.

(I just went by the extension in your email address - if that is the site you are talking about)

[ptah]

The site is referral based, it is a local gaming community in Coquitlam (near Vancouver), and was based around a couple high schools.

Me and my friends run it, We have around 150 average people viewing the website at one time, and people refer each other to join it (in a similiar fashion to how LiveJournal uased to be).

At one point in time, we were not invite only.

[topdog]

There it is. You think the high school kids are accessing your site on the school network throughout the day? All those clicks coming from the same IP... that could be what triggered the suspension.

[fischermx]

Your new site that you added may not have passed the requirements to enter the program.

I feel like this is going to be my modus operandi from now on.
Eventhough they don't requiere it so, I'm going to ask to the adsense team to approve, even informally each site I add to my account, at least if I got kicked I know it was not because my site or content was not appropiate, ooh, it will still not cover the "invalid clicks" arguments, oops!

[ptah]

We actually banned the local "vance" proxies from the site some months ago, due to this and other problems (eg, abusive users spamming on our forums, etc. and the school districts not dealing with the problem.)

Still at a loss of why it got disabled, now.

[david_uk]

You say your site is "online gaming".

Adsense TOS says:-
"Site may not include:
Gambling or casino-related content"

Maybe that's the reason?

[ptah]

.. We got the site approved with that description on the front page. Also it goes into detail of what games we host.

[david_uk]

We got the site approved with that description on the front page. Also it goes into detail of what games we host.

Interesting. It was just a thought. I guess the only people that can tell you is adsense support, and it sounds like they aren't communicating well.

I'd keep emailing them, and hopefully they will give you a clue. It may be an idea to ask them if it's because of the gambling content. They might answer a question that requires a yes/no answer better than an open question. Despite the fact person a at adsense approved the site, person b might say it doesn't comply.

[jomaxx]

My only useful observation is that your site is mostly, if not all, hidden behind password protection. Were there AdSense ads on pages that the MediaPartners spider would not have been able to access?

[ptah]

No, only sites that were accessible had ads on them.

[incrediBILL]

The site is referral based, it is a local gaming community in Coquitlam (near Vancouver), and was based around a couple high schools.

That could explain everything - maybe they were clicking on a lot of stuff to 'help' the site. Not like teens are known for high conversion and we've seen Google boot sites for 'inappropriate' traffic before which had nothing to do with click fraud.

[ptah]

Well, if I got kicked for "inappropriate" traffic that's pretty dirty, that was pretty much the only funding our site received and I will be forced to shut it down because of that.

Wonderful.

[oddsod]

if I got kicked for "inappropriate" traffic that's pretty dirty

Some low traffic, low earning sites may not be worth Google's while. They are at liberty to choose their partners and may have some threshold they haven't disclosed. This doesn't help you but if you reapply with another site you may want to make sure it's got at least a few hundred different IPs and a few thousand page impressions per month.

[jomaxx]

Well, it's certainly not Google's responsibility to pay for your site.

I wouldn't normally expect Google to label low-converting traffic as "invalid clicks", but if the audience was entirely high school kids and the conversion rate over time was 0.00%, then maybe they would.

[topdog]

I wouldn't normally expect Google to label low-converting traffic as "invalid clicks", but if the audience was entirely high school kids and the conversion rate over time was 0.00%, then maybe they would.

How does Google track conversion rate? I have an adwords account and I don't recall anywhere on there where it asked me to report my conversion ratios.

Please advise.

[novice]

How does Google track conversion rate? I have an adwords account and I don't recall anywhere on there where it asked me to report my conversion ratios.

Please advise.

[adwords.google.com...]