Account not active? No reason why?

Doesn't make sense

[Compworld]

I've been in Google Adsense since it started. Every month or so, I make a few thousand dollars here an there. Last month I made over 10,000 for my first time ever. I logged in today, and my eCPM is up, as well as my earnings. I just tried to login, but cannot. I receive the following message when I try to login:

Account Not Active
An AdSense account does not exist for this login, as it is associated with an unapproved application. For more information about your application, please review the message we sent to the email address you provided with your application.

I hadn't received any message, nor any reason or contact. What do I do? What will happen to the money I earned last month and this month? I follow the rules to a T. I do not know what is going on here.

[suzyvirtual]

Compworld,
First of all, relax.
I was kicked out of adsense for invalid clicks, and reinstated about 3 weeks later after trading a couple emails with them.
My first email simply stated that I had not violated the TOS and that I was willing to cooperate in any way to help prove that and asked politely what recourse I might have.
A few days later google got back to me with a list of questions about my site (traffic sources, how frequent are my updates, do i have any business partners etc.) I answered all the questions honestly and politely.
After about another week they reinstated me and said that they determined it was indeed not my fault.
I am certainly curious as to what happened behind the scenes, but I also wouldn't want to push the issue. This all happened about 3 months ago, and everything has been dandy since then (except for my constant creeping adsense related paranoia--but thats another story)
You'll also be interested to know that I was kicked out 2 days before the February payments (I forget the exact date, but it was March 20-something) were issued. I received my February check on time, even though it was during my "cast out" period.
I also got my March check right on time, although I had been reinstated by that point, I wondered if there might be a "hiccup" and there was not.
So, personally, I do not believe that adsense "owes" you (or me) anything and all the sueing talk is probably not in your best interest. If, in fact, you haven't done anything wrong, my take is that they are very reasonable--perhaps a bit slow with the emails--but reasonable nonetheless.
Good Luck!

[rish]

suzyvirtual, did you continue earning from Adsense during the three weeks you were in limbo?

If I was suspended and hadn't received hundreds in past earnings, hundreds in current earnings and wasn't sure what would happen to hundreds in future earnings I would find in very hard to relax!

Replace 'hundreds' with 'thousands' and your life could be in limbo while the matter is resolved.

[suzyvirtual]

No, I did not have any income because the ads stop showing when you are inactive.
Fortunately adsense is not a huge part of my income, but for those people who rely solely or mostly on it, I agree that it would be very scary--the only way around that is diversification, in my opinion.

[suzyvirtual]

Understanding that it can be very scary, I was telling compworld to relax because I think a relaxed manner of approaching adsense will probably do him more good than threatening to sue them. The whole you catch more flies with honey thing....
I don't discount how nerve wracking it is to go through.

[novice]

If CompWorld does decide to take legal action here is a tidbit of info from AdSense TOS.

This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of California , except for its conflicts of laws principles. Any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with this Agreement shall be adjudicated in Santa Clara County, California.

[incrediBILL]

He gets a vacation to boot :)

[novice]

He gets a vacation to boot :)

LOL :)

[Compworld]

Where did I say sue? I said get the law involved, not sue. There's the ABA, BBB, consultations, etc. I never said sue in any of my posts, I believe.

[Celicaphile]

BBB is hardly the law. Actually it's a joke.

[suzyvirtual]

compworld, sorry to misquote you, i think others started using the word "sue" and i got confused.
still, just wanted to let you know that being patient and polite seemed to work well for me.

[incrediBILL]

compworld first said:

then I will will pursue my legal options

then compworld said:

Well, I guess that is whay lawyers are for.

finally compworld said:

Where did I say sue? I said get the law involved, not sue. There's the ABA, BBB, consultations, etc. I never said sue in any of my posts, I believe.

You never directly mentioned sue but you mentioned lawyers and since it's a contract dispute, which is civil matter to be exact, the implication of your statements was to sue.

So getting the 'law' involved in such a matter implies suing unless I'm missing something.

[derekwong28]

Hi All

Guess what, as of today I have just joined the suspended Adsense account club!?!

I logged into my account at 8.00am this morning, all the figures were normal, absolutely no hint of unusual click activity. By 9.00am, I was unable to log into my account! My webhoster told me that there was no unusual activity between 8-9.00am

I would be extremely surprised if my account was banned because of content. They cover 60 sites from well established forums and educational sites to site built on news feeds. I certainly have no idea that this could happen because I asked Google to hold back payments for the past 2 months.

Derek

[hunderdown]

Derek, this is just a shot in the dark, but could this be related to your recent problems with pagerank, which you posted about in Google News?

Also, have you received the dreaded email itself, or just been unable to log in?

[derekwong28]

This would be the nightmare scenerio for me, that some human from Google have decided to ban my sites and Adsense account at the same time.

However, I have got good reason to believe that the drop in PR was not done intentionally by a human. Thirty other sites on the same server was unaffected. The traffic to the affected sites from Google have actually increased.

I would be extremely surprised if the sites were banned because of the content. They are not scrapper sites but do get a lot of free content from newsfeeds, press release, wikepedia etc. Moroever, users do submit a lot of their own articles for us to put up. If duplicate content is the reason for banning our Adsense account, surely there are much bigger fishes to fry.

I have not received the dreaded e-mail yet, I will wait for a reply from Google and keep you updated.

Derek

[hunderdown]

Some people have reported being suspended--presumably for some kind of detailed review--for a few days, and then being reinstated. Perhaps what happened to you?

[Compworld]

Well, I am still waiting for a response. They do not respond to my e-mails. What other approach do I use? I was going to send another e-mail this week, but it seems pointless. They do not want to reply to me. My last e-mail I sent was last Wednesday I think. That is a total of 7 e-mails, and zero responses. Do you can this professional? What is going on with Google? I've never been treated so poorly with my 3 + years with them.

[frox]

Yes, this closing all communications with banned publishers (even ones with a long, reputable history) is really annoying and gives you the exact feeling of how shaky this whole Adsense thing is.

As I already pleaded to ASA in another thread, Google should really give 30 minutes of their time to review cases like yours... It's really a poor investment on their not to do.

(and they should give 1 minute of their time to scrutinize each new site placed in the program, but that's another story..)

[lammert]

Well, I am still waiting for a response.

If I read your posts correctly, you didn't even receive the canned email that the account is suspended/disabled. This seems strange to me. Are you sure that the mails from Google aren't blocked by some spamfilter and that the email address known to Google is currently working?

Or maybe the reply address of the emails you sent them is different from the address of your account and therefore they couldn't match your requests with the account involved.

[Compworld]

Positive. I replied back to one of the two e-mails they sent me. It seems one hand does not know what the other hand is doing over there. No suspended e-mail, no responses after the first two. I would love to know what is going on.

[derekwong28]

Compworld, can you give us an update on your situation?

I finally received an e-mail from Adsense today, citing invalid clicks as the reason for suspension. This is just about the last reason I would have expected to hear.

To recap, I logged into my account at 8.00am one morning. There was no evidence of an elevated no. of clicks or increase in CTR. By 9.00am, my account had been suspended. Therefore if anything happened, it happened within this one hour period. I talked to my webhoster and he could not detect any abnormal activity during this period.

Over the past several month, my CTR, no, of clicks and earnings have been going down. I can swear that I do not participate in generating invalid clicks. If I have any intention of doing so, I would not have opted to roll over payments due to me.

I have asked Adsense to review this suspension and Unforunately, we make hardly $1000 a month on this account and this may not be worth their bother to investigate.

The moral of the story is this

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ROLL OVER YOUR MONTHLY PAYMENTS

[lammert]

Over the past several month, my CTR, no, of clicks and earnings have been going down.

I hate to talk about patterns in a "banned from AdSense" thread because they are often used in the wrong way, but I remember that some months ago there were some banned posters telling exactly the same. The reason could be that the invalid clicks happened during a long period and that the Google algorithm automatically corrected for it, until they found evidence that there was indeed a pattern of invalid clicks. Another reason could be that the site has been victim of a click attack for some time where the click attacker not only generated clicks, but also (too many) fake impressions to look like a normal visitor.

Some threads where this occured:

• [webmasterworld.com ] by suzivirtual msg#1: "I have actually noticed quite a drop in my adsense revenue lately, as opposed to any suspicious clicks..."
  
• [webmasterworld.com ] bu miguelito msg#3: "the click rate has been reducing whilst the traffic increases "
  

When the site is victim of a smart click attack with combined page reloads, the clicker (human or click bot) doesn't know the real statistics of the site and therefore tries to generate a CTR which would be "normal" for the site. A good way to detect possible click attacks in an early stage is to use channel data. The CTR between my best and worst performing channel is 100:1. No click attacker knows my average CTR, nor do they know the CTR of individual channels which makes it almost impossible for them to mimic ordinary visitors. For this reason I have a daily watch at my channel data.

[derekwong28]

It looks like that my account had been reinstated! Perhaps with some help from ASA, thanks!

Derek

[novice]

Derec wrote,

The moral of the story is this

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ROLL OVER YOUR MONTHLY PAYMENTS

That could be a good faith gesture.

I think that most AdSense scammers are sweating bullets at the end of the month waiting for their check, not asking Google to hold on to their money for a few months :)

Congrats, glad it worked out for you.

[woodagain]

Congrats derek :)

[suzyvirtual]

Congrats. We need to build a treehouse or something for our little club (I have been kicked-out and reinstated too).