Adsense is Playing Hardball.

Banned two of my sites this week!

[Skeptic]

Grrr! Someone from Google Adsense contacted me on Thursday, informed me that one of my sites was violating their TOS (he would not specify what the infraction was) and pointed me to their Adsense TOS page.

I replied, "What is the problem, I will fix it".

(Mods, below is all paraphrased, please do not delete)

"No, since you violated our terms, your site has been disqualified and Adsense has been disabled." POOF!

Nearest I can figure, the site was knocked out because I had two images next to an Adsense rectangle, 336x280.

Being apprehensive at this point, I started to redesign my other sites. Instead of graphics, I put a Chitika ad next to an Adsense rectange. I email the Adsense support and asked them to review the page. I specifically asked him "Can I put a Chitika ad next to an Adsense rectangle. If not, let me know and I will remove it."

Reply came near the end of the day Friday. "The site you showed us violates the Google TOS and Adsense has been disabled." POOF!

This is pretty outrageous - I ASKED them to review a site for me, and they disabled Adsense on it?! (Perhaps it is a new employee out to impress his "boss" by knocking out websites)

My account is still active, but Adsense has been disabled on two domains. Lucky for me I have a YPN account. I don't know what the rest of you who live outside the US are going to do, but you need to prepare for the worst I imagine.

[edited by: Skeptic at 8:36 pm (utc) on Jan. 12, 2008]

[europeforvisitors]

My best description would be to call them "affiliate sites." Nothing dodgy on them. Duplicate content perhaps.

FWIW, Google has made its corporate feelings clear about "thin affiliate sites" for several years, at least. GoogleGuy discussed the topic a few times on the Google Search News forum here, and a leaked "spam recognition" manual for Google quality evaluators specifically mentioned thin affiliate sites as being "offensive" from a spam-recognition point of view. (It also mentioned "secondary search results" such as scraped search results and recycled directory feeds).

[LostOne]

Boy, the more I read about adsense the more I almost become frightened with all the horror stories. I've read that TOS over and over again and folks..it's cut and dry...darned simple in my opinion. I'm sure the oodles of "I've been kicked out of adsense" threads around here are probably from ones that don't pay attention to it.

I take adsense and other contextural opportunites very seriously, but going very slow with it. It's not a jump in right away type of deal. Like any other business, research has to be done and this forum is by far the best source for it!

“I can't help thinking of all the posts we've seen here by publishers who've wanted to know if this or that would get them into trouble. Why invite problems?”

Right one Europe! Btw, your comments are inspiring and I try not to miss a beat but I haven't made it back to thread page 880 or something yet.

I don't need simple mistakes like what I see so often on this board to ruin things. Photos and adsense ads were thoroughly discussed from day one to when they banned it...but you have to dig far back to pick up the timeline.