HELP - I"ve been banned from AdSense :(

[born2drv]

I've done nothing malicious at all to deserve this. I run a small informational based website that I wrote all the content for.

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?

[Scurramunga]

Congratualtions to you. I am glad to hear that you have cleared yourself.

However I am very disturbed by what has unfolded and disappointed with Google's initial reluctance to hear you out. It is somewhat disturbing to consider the possibility that your situation would have been different if it weren't for the WW member and your persistence. Who knows how many other less fortunate but innocent publishers have gone to the dogs in this way?

I mostly erred on Googles side upon hearing most banning stories and have been of attitude that bannings must occur for good reason. However your reinstatement ( and maybe a few others I have read about) clearly demonstrates that innocent publishers do get caught up in Googles net. Googles attitude toward you demonstrates to me that under most circumstances Google is unlikely to give these publishers a chance.

I know this sounds extremely naive, but wouldn't it be good if Google could devise a review system for publishers with reasonable grounds

[edited by: Scurramunga at 7:22 am (utc) on Aug. 18, 2006]

[John Carpenter]

I wonder whether their decision was based just on benefit of doubt or on a real human's finding "Oh, yes, our click fraud detection software was obviously wrong"?

[edited by: John_Carpenter at 9:58 am (utc) on Aug. 18, 2006]