Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I also have a forums section for people to post questions related to these products and I answer them free of charge to the best of my ability. In exchange of course I display ads and get paid revenue from Google.
2 weeks ago I started getting a huge surge in both traffic and clicks. At first I was happy because it seemed as though I was getting more traffic, more visitors and more clicks.
Eventually I realized it was an anomoly and that the big spike was some robot or something with a reffer string from overture.com for a keyword search phrase of a very obscure search term that was hitting one single page in my phpbb forum over and over again, all from random IP addresses and from there clicking everything randomly, sometimes other pages, sometimes Google ads, etc.
I contacted my server company because I thought I was under attack from a spammer or link robot or possibly a hacker trying to hack phpBB or even my website. But there wasn't much they could do.
I have all my logs I could submit to Google. I have my correspondence I sent to my hosting provider as proof. I've been a good advertiser for years with no issues!
I appealed but got a generic message saying my appeal was denied. What do I do now?
IMO that's enough to prove that I'm inocent.The rest is they'r job to make Analytics work with webcams.
Actually the contract you signed says otherwise.
No! your claim is denied.
I've been suspecting something for a while and maybe you can confirm it, give us a very vague estimate of your earnings/m & traffic, is it in the tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds ..?
It's in the hundreds per month area, depending on season of course it's been known to be higher.
It's not my own source of income but it's enough to pay for a decent car finance payment each month and it still hurts.
Maybe it's just not worth their time to investigate this amount of volume, who knows. It's really sad that is has come to this, Google should really be ashamed.
I called Google headquarters and naturally since their automated system is so good at redirecting you to their website, the only way to get to a live person was trying to use the automated directory to look up someone's name and ring their extension. I keyed in "Brin" and the phone rang, I was nervous thinking he may even pick up, but he didn't of course, I got a voicemail message so I left my message begging him or someone to call.
I also appealed again through email saying that I would give them full access to my server and all the logs of all of my websites. But of course their first denial letter said any future appeals many not even be read or responded too, so that's not too promising.
So if that's not cooperation I don't know what is. If that doesn't work I may well just give up. Or I could drive their since I live in Los Angeles, it's only 5 hours away, and make myself a sign and picket on their front lawn like some nut job until they hear me out LOL. I suppose I better drive soon while I can still make the car payment! LOOOL
is exactly what I was thinking, if you have to deal with tens or hundreds of thouthands of publishers, you too would draw a line below which manual checking is not efficient, but what do I know anyway, keep trying and don't give up.
Good luck.
Maybe it's just not worth their time to investigate this amount of volume, who knows.
Or maybe they have a profiling system that takes a whole bunch of things into account, such as the quantity of traffic, type of content, frequency of new users vs. repeat users, clickthrough rate, conversion rate, revenues, etc.
Let's assume that the Googleteams rely heavily on data-mining technology, as has been suggested by Ronburk, our resident data-mining guru. If that's the case, maybe they throw all kinds of numbers from each AdSense account into a great big "black box" and feed in profiles of accounts that are known to be clean or to have caused trouble. One day, your site is the victim of a clickbot attack, and the black box decides:
Forum + predominant keywords + certain traffic level + unusually low or high CTR + "smart pricing" discount of X percent + revenue below $#*$! a month + invalid clicks = [ALARM SOUNDS]. You've fit the profile of sites that ought to be dumped, whether or not it can be shown that you're responsible for the last item on the profile list (the invalid clicks).
Mind you, this is pure speculation, and the example is strictly hypothetical, but I think you can see my point.
If it's any consolation, other publishers have been reinstated (as we've seen in previous posts), so--with any luck--Google will review your case. Don't be completely discouraged by the initial "Sorry, you're out of luck" response: It's possible that they simply don't want to make things easy.
Forum + predominant keywords + certain traffic level + unusually low or high CTR + "smart pricing" discount of X percent + revenue below $#*$! a month + invalid clicks
No not always means No, it sometimes means Please try again later, or work at a different area ;-)
[added for the dirty minded]
a different area could mean a little lower.. ehm YPN maybe?
[edited by: Hobbs at 7:04 am (utc) on Aug. 11, 2006]
When it was especially bad my google like detection code would autoban, this had a false alarm rate of under 5% but I am sure it was a real pain for the unfairly banned people.
Running such a system where abusers were banned within minutes did after a few weeks stop them trying at all, having switched back to a manual review the incidents seem on the rise again.
As for appeals, well there were some clear innocents that instantly got reinstated, but like google the prospect of letting potentially dodgey people on the books means a policy of if in doubt then you stay banned. The alternative is far more resources spent on policing things, and the risk that google will see abuse occuring on my sites and bar me.
They had written just above a leader bord
"Please visit all our competitors, to see that we are the best"
I reported, 3 days later, the text was removed
2 month later, they wrote again
"Please visit all our competitors, to see that we are the best"
I reported, 3 days later, the text was removed
Now I visited this site again, no AdSense anymore.
I took them 3 severe violations to get banned. So it seems in some cases is Google very peacefull until banning.
I'm starting to think the minimum defence an AdSense publisher needs is the ability to push a button and have all ads removed from all pages within a matter of minutes.
One way to do this is put your code for each ad type into an individual file (one ad per file) that you can #include into your pages. There aren't a huge number of AdSense ad types (120x240, 120x600, etc.) If you need to turn off your ads, you just empty the include file (or move its contents into a comment), and everywhere that file is #included will just become blank space.
I took them 3 severe violations to get banned. So it seems in some cases is Google very peacefull until banning.
It really depends on damn mood of the google representative working on the case.
If he/she got laid last night, or even better, an early one, you'll get more indulgence.
I have seen a handful of people re-instated. Those people, from what I gathered, were victims. Of the rest of the people, almost all of them to the number eventually admitted to some kind of behavior or activity that got them banned.
So I think the odds of someone who was wrongfully kicked from the Adsense program is extremely high.
From reading the story here, my first inclination is you were caught by mistake. Plead your case, provide all the data you talked about here and explain what you think might have happened. Do it politely, and persistently. I suspect if you do that, you will find your account re-instated.
Their systems do make mistkes, but from what I have seen they are extremely rare, and almost always rectified by hand. I can't think of a case where someone seemed to have been illegitimately banned and not let back in.
So good luck, but you should be persistant with them.
I submitted multiple appeals and they were rejected (I guess each appeal opens up a new ticket in their system).
But if you reply to the appeal declined email, it then bumps the ticket (the ticket # is in the subject of the email). This doesn't gaurantee that someone will look into it though.
Someone on WW was kind enough to help me get in touch with someone on the phone, the answer I got from this person was "how did you get this number, I can't really help you" ...etc however I prodded him further and pleaded with him, so he told me to reply to the email again and that it would bump the ticket up and he wrote down my ticket number and passed it on to the review personel to look into it further.
So I again bumped the ticket by replying and I got a reply back from someone saying they were investigating and to be patient.
3 days later (today) I just got re-instated. They did not want to review my logs apparently. They did make adjustments to the amounts of clicks, etc and it seems like I'm back in business now.
So thanks to everyone for your moral support and to that one WW member that really helped me out. I suggest you all keep a very watchful eye on your traffic/clicks!
Great that somebody took action on your behalf!
I would still apply for YPN anyway, just as backup for the future.
I only run it on one page but it really lets me sleep at night.
And, well done Google. I normally give you a lot of grief for the things you do wrong. But, having a human look at the reasons behind the ban is alright with me. :)
Most of us presume it's more cost-effective for Google to just ban small publishers without doing a manual review. But keep bothering them with emails and phone calls and suddenly it becomes more cost-effective to do the review rather than deal with your persistent pestering.
I agree they are worrying about cost effectiveness, but I'm thinking its more the cost effectiveness of their PR campaigns if stuff like this is causing outrage in public :).
I have noticed Google prick their ears up lately when negative publicity is mentioned, although it might be that when I have a dispute with them these days thats the angle I think of first.
To the OP..
Is it possible to cloak by referrer? In the days when cloaking was not considered a bad thing I used to cloak by IP and user-agent. If it is possible to cloak by referrer you could send any suspects to an ad-free page or just an educational message.
It shows that it can be done.
so you got re-instated, but only because you were able to circumvent the incompetence of google.
as a publisher, i find it very discouraging that google would do that to people like us, who work hard to bring in honest traffic and honest revenue for google advertisers... why is the google appeal process such a P.O.S.?
congrats to you, born2drv... but this thread makes me sick.
Ann
Someone on WW was kind enough to help me get in touch with someone on the phone
that is what makes WW great place.
Congratulation Bro!
