Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Well now their my best friend again because after an email I sent them using the form (a link to which was in my dismissal email):
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"One day last week there was a lot of activity on my site
with 20 or so searches and a 99% click through rate supposedly paying me
$?.
Obviously I thought this was strange at the time but I can assure you this was absolutely nothing to do with me or ANYONE associated with me.
I assumed you would redress it in some way but not like this!
I categorically do not accept any responsibility for these invalid clicks.
Please respond."
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I got a letter saying <paraphrase>they're investigating</paraphrase>
I responded to this email with:
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"Hello
Thank you very much for taking the time to review my case.
I am happy to give you my logs for all the urls that have adsense on them. I am also ready to track down all the ips I have accessed the account from (there's not that many).
Although at this stage I am unsure of exactly what has caused this (apart from the obvious anomaly reported) I will look to inform you immediately of any irregularities in my account in future if reinstated.
Naturally I do not claim any click fees you indeed deem invalid (in fact to date I have never claimed any money from the account and I have been running it without any problems for over a year).
Thank you."
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...and today i am back in. Whoopee! The whole process took about a week and a bit and my ads might not be back for 48 hours.
Now i am going to go through my site with a fine toothcombe, making sure I am whiter than white (even though none of the above was my fault). The prospect of my hobby sites without Adsense was quite frankly an eye opener.
The lesson here to me was:
DONT SEE INVALID CLICK-THRUs AS A WINDFALL. REPORT IT IMMEDIATELY (and of course, get my money out immediately!)
:)
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:52 pm (utc) on Feb. 28, 2007]
[edit reason] TOS [webmasterworld.com] Violation. No emails. [/edit]
why on MARS would anyone not get their money ASAP (every month)?
Oh well... it's coming out now!
over the year I'd left all my money in my account
Must say that one puzzles me too!
But congrats sandpetra, glad to hear you're back in. It's also good to know Google deals fairly and works with publishers who haven't abused the system. :)
Was there anything else useful you noted unusual
about the fraud, or just the sudden volume
of clicks?
(whoops - sorry about the TOS violation - it's just not my week - I think I have been up way too long doing this stuff this week!)
One things for sure. Tonight i go to bed loving Google again (in about 6 hours anyway).....
In this instance, the fact that the OP had left all the money as owing may well have helped persuade Google to reinstate the account.
Problem , similar .. a very high CTR ( over 100%) on 120 impressions.
Well , I am waiting for a resolution, before I put ads back on.
Meanwhile I am losing money. But I guess, it is better to wait.
BTW the large no. of clicks were automatically discounted by G , because I got nothing from them.
I really hope all is fine. The tension is ...terrible..
The only reason I can think of for not having monies owning paid to you routinely every month
You should be fine. Removing the ads might have been a good idea just in case someone is messing with ya.
They usually get back to ya within 5 days. I have reported such things in the past and the team was helpful. I do have to say that it looks better when a site owner takes the initiative on such matters.
A good thing to have is a tracker in realtime. Not completely accurate but like ours we know the ip addresses, referring pages, which ads they clicked, time, page clicked from, etc. This helps to find potential problems right off the bat. You can go as far as to create a tracker to auto/manual ban an ip if something looks screwey (especially if you are away) or to auto/manual turn off your ads across your site if needs be. Fun Fun Fun
from looking at my stats, i reckon that the "real time" reporting of adsense is about 24-48 hours behind, so i don't worry about massive CTR anymore as they are talking their time filtering clicks anyways.
You can go as far as to create a tracker to auto/manual ban an ip if something looks screwey
[edited by: joelgreen at 4:15 pm (utc) on Mar. 1, 2007]
You were probably fortunate that your reported what happened to you BEFORE the ban.
This is a little disturbing though. I always assumed that G would just note a single event to keep an eye on it in the future, but your post suggests that even one click attack could take an account down. To me, this would be a serious mistake. It leaves the publisher wide open to attack.
In a way, I hope that you have been hit with many click attacks and this one just tipped the scale otherwise at any given time, any of us smaller publishers could get whacked out of the system by a click happy kiddie.
The only reason I can think of for not having monies owning paid to you routinely every month
one more reason would be to minimize "check conversion fees".
Another reason would be taxes. I usually defer at least November & December every year. Why pay taxes on it right away when I can defer payment another year?
G has not yet replied. and I am still waiting.
All is o.K.
I guess, I passed the sniff test or whatever.
:-)
All is o.K.
I actually told Google about it in one mail but they didn’t respond to that. 7 days later I got banned.
I have blog on free domain and can't get to logs etc. Can't install Google analy. on it either because they using it for whole domain.
Google banned me and they don't even answer my e-mails. What to do? Do they have real people working somewhere that I can phone to them visit them in RL and talk to them?
I told Google until someone responded and they did.
...and today i am back in. Whoopee! The whole process took about a week and a bit and my ads might not be back for 48 hours.
I am very happy for you and very glad that Google was able to investigate deeper and realize that you were honest publisher. You may want to comment on my post here [webmasterworld.com...] .
It is heartening to find that I have been treated this way and gives hope to everyone i think if you're not doing anything wrong Google will listen to you.
:)
