Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My husband runs a website with a forum. It is free to use but he runs adverts to pay the bills. For nearly a year he has been using Google Adsense, and we had about £300 in our account.
Last week we got an email from Google that said we had broken the terms and conditions of our account, and it listed a number of possible reasons. We are not aware of breaking any terms, or doing anything on the list of reasons.
Emailed them back for an explanation of why our account has been disabled, but all they will say is that we have violated the T&C's but they cannot tell us exactly what we have done wrong.
It's annoying as we have acted in good faith, but we are being punished for something we haven't done. If they could tell us the IP where the clicks came from, we could check our database to see if it was one of our users, but Google won't give us that information.
Has anyone else been in this situation? If so, how did you get your account reinstated or the money outstanding paid?
Any help would be appreciated.
[edited by: petunia at 10:26 pm (utc) on Aug. 9, 2007]
What to do when you're kicked out of Adsense [webmasterworld.com]
Meaning you're buying traffic from some other source to come to your web site?
Google now seems to be cracking down on this and it could be the reason.
Other issues can be inciting people to click, improperly labeling ads, drawing attention to your ads, etc.
Identify where you may have screwed up. Read the post that was suggested and follow up.
Good luck.
The problem with forums and other user generated content is CONTROL over what is written. Adsense is not for many subjects that can easily be discussed or bought up even in an unrelated forum. Thread hijacking is very common and you can see many examples on WW also. Unless the forum is very well moderated with agressive fiters, adSense may not be a good idea. Poor CONTENT ( against adSense TOS) is most likely the problem that caused your problems. However this is only a guess. There could be many other problems like Martinibuster mentioned.
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That might help give you an idea of why it happened to you, good luck.
The ads were on the top of the forum home page and each thread.
The forum is for workers in a large UK company with offices all over the UK - a sort of unoffical staff room. We never drew attention to the ads, or told people to click on them, and we never bought traffic.
I will read the linked thread, and read the TOS again, but I'm still at a loss as to why we have been suspended.
Might be disparaging remarks or the company itself complained via feedback on the ads
The forum is for workers in a large UK company with offices all over the UK - a sort of unoffical staff room.
Another problem that could be caused by this sort of forum is that it could make it look like your husband's friends, or possibly even your husband are doing all the clicking.
Many companies run their own firewall that uses the same IP address for everyone (or large groups of people) within that organization. So it could be that an unusually high number of clicks were coming from the same IP. It's possible also that your husband's used his computer at work to log into his AdSense account. That would make it look like the clicks were coming from the same PC that logs into the AdSense account.
Be sure to point this out when you appeal to AdSense. I recall someone from Google's AdSense forum who was reinstated after explaining a similar situation to AdSense staff.
