What if your competitors click on your ads to get you banned?

Scary thought ...

[Nick Jachelson]

I just realized somnething .. what would happen if your competitors decide to get you banned from AdSense by clicking on your ads repeatedly? Or it could be just some guy whom you offended for some reason with the content of you site?

In my niche the competition is pretty hot and I don't think using these sort of tactics is beyond some webmasters.

Has this ever happened to anyone? Is there anything that can be done to prevent this?

[frox]

Has this ever happened to anyone?

Yes, you read if here quite often. Top tragi-comedical post was from a user being banned because of the ex-girl friend:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Is there anything that can be done to prevent this?

not a lot. Watch your stats, and in case of any strange variation investigate. There is not much that can be done, but at least you can alert Google and temporarily disable the ads (like I am doing in this moment because of strange fluctuations)

[europeforvisitors]

This has been discussed in many threads. You should be able to find them if you dig back far enough.

Click attacks can happen, but in my experience, you shouldn't have a problem if:

1) You notify Google of anything that looks extremely suspicious (such as a $1,300 spike in a matter of hours, which I once discovered in my AdSense earnings report;

2) You have a clean site that wasn't obviously made for AdSense and would withstand a manual review.

[uhwebs]

I have a hard time believing that G is stupid enough to ban sites for other people click-attacking.

I don't check my account every day, so I couldn't immediately notify google if I had an attack.

Doesn't google review sites in any way before banning?

[celgins]

I've read about this topic in other threads, so you should be able to locate them with a search.

I've also been a little concerned about those rogue individuals who repeatedly click your ads out of spite, or for some other reason.

I'm about to launch a massive newsletter submission campaign to my subscribers. But since my CTR hasn't been great over the past year (too busy and too lazy to promote my own site!), I don't want Google to become "too alerted" by a large increase in CTR or ad revenues.

I may take the advice of others and simply send Google a quick email right before that spike takes place.

This isn't exactly the same as a mean individual clicking like hell on your ads, but you may want to give Google a heads up if you suspect something.

[brianng]

And what if somebody created a site that violated Google's TOS. Then they put your adsense code on that site and report it to Google?

[hunderdown]

Your code on someone else's site--don't lose any sleep over that. How hard would it be for Google to figure out who the REAL owner is?

[Scurramunga]

I'm sure that 99% of us don't have anything to worry about

[jchampliaud]

I'm about to launch a massive newsletter submission campaign to my subscribers. But since my CTR hasn't been great over the past year (too busy and too lazy to promote my own site!), I don't want Google to become "too alerted" by a large increase in CTR or ad revenues.

I just did something like this an saw a large spike in ctr. My income went waaay up but I got no e-mails from Google.

[celgins]

I'm thinking that if I do not contact Google beforehand, things will be okay. My current CTR is above 10%, but I know page impressions will go through the roof.