"Reload Every" addon to get you lower earnings or ban from Adsense?

[menial]

So my competitors may install the "Reload Every" addon (http://reloadevery.mozdev.org/) on their Firefox browsers, go to my webpages that have Adsense on it, set auto-page refreshing every 1 second and run it 24 hours a day.

Then my Adsense earnings per click go down and Google may ban me for generating "artificial page impressions"?

Google strictly prohibits any method used to artificially generate clicks or page impressions and closely monitors activity using engineering systems and human analysis.

www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9718

True or not?

[europeforvisitors]

Google pays out hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings every quarter to publishers who aren't banned, so competitor sabotage doesn't seem to be a major problem.

It's more likely that Google would track down and ban publishers who were stupid enough to pull a juvenile stunt like that.

[BigDave]

You can't get banned if you don't have an account. It's the safest way to go.

[menial]

So the two answers above do confirm this "trick" could work against Adsense publishers? I'm not trying to put Google down, just trying to assess potential risks (since I'm going to open Adsense account after all)...

From what I know juvenile crime (unfortunately) works pretty well in many areas. And Firefox and its extensions are becoming more and more popular among Internet users (not to mention webmasters - my competitors - themselves).

[europeforvisitors]

Take BigDave's advice. You'll sleep better at night and spend less time worrying out loud in this forum. :-)

[menial]

Thanks for advice. But it would be nice to hear other opinions too (because now you left me worrying even more).

[fredw]

I think the consensus here on this topic is that if this does happen to your website, Google is smart enough to be able to tell the difference between someone attacking you and you doing it yourself to inflate your earnings.

So keep logs and be diligent about watching your traffic, but don't lose a lot of sleep about it.

[jomaxx]

NO it could not work. They're not idiots. They're one of the smartest organizations in the world and have been monitoring AdSense traffic behaviour for years. If you have code on your page that could cause excess impressions, yes it's a problem. If some jerk reloads your page 5,000 times, no.

[martinibuster]

1. That's a boring trick, easy to adjust for.

get you lower earnings

2. It's a boring myth that higher imps will get you lower earnings. Your eCPM may go down but the EPC stays the same.

[menial]

I understand almost everything becomes "boring" for a very busy forum moderator after a while...

But if you confirm it's not a big issue, I take the advice and scratched yet another point and am closer to signing up with Adsense. More questions may follow though ;).

[koan]

You know, if you lose your account you'll be exactly where you are now, without one, but at least, you won't be worrying about every little possible scenarios anymore, so you might even be better off.

[RonS]

You want to hear other opinions?

My wife thinks I should lose a little weight.

[jomaxx]

Okay, let's get real: You're not asking questions in order to determine whether to sign up for AdSense, you're trolling. You're probably no more a potential publisher than you are the potential AdWords advertiser you claimed to be the other day. I assume you already DID sign up for AdSense at some point and it ended badly; hence your many barbed comments disparaging Google.