Forum Moderators: martinibuster
All looked fine, there were rules in place to prevent duplicate content... then we closed for 3 weeks holiday.
End of holidays, our lead programmer ended up off for another week sick.
The day he before he comes back, we get an email our adsense account has been disabled as our network of sites does not comply with the spirit of Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines.
Now these are not made for AdSense sites, and they were not designed to present empty pages such as "You searched for BLAH but we've got nothing” type sites.. but the reality is... this is what happened for 4 weeks.
Across this network, we must have been serving many of these pages, probably millions.
Whilst Google did not advise of the exact problem, we are assuming that this was it. We have since fixed the problem which was far from intentional, but it appears our days as a Google publisher are over.
Purpose of this email is to point out, webmaster monetising through AdSense need to not just be on guard for problems like fraudulent clicks.... they need to ensure their programming does not serve up pages with little content, or pages capable of being declared doorway pages, or pages with duplicate content. Being unaware of a problem or its cause being accidental appears to be no defence.
Exhaustively check your programming, and do all you can to test for pages being served that really should not be.
yes, well am well and truly diversifying monetisation now.
That won't help much if you don't test your site after a massive code change and then leave it with nobody looking after it for 3-4 weeks at a time.
As someone that runs a big directory, I'm pretty sure Google frowns upon "a network of local portals" because that's kind of spamming the search engine. Maybe it was your pages malfunctioning, maybe it was your business model, hard to say.
Look on the bright side, I know a network of portals that have been completely dropped from Google's index so it could've been much worse than just losing your AdSense account.
What you should take away from this experience at a minimum is to improve your testing process and never leave your site on auto-pilot for more than a day or two if you're serious about your online business.
Most cities have several portals covering only their town.. whats the difference if a single owner does that for every town?
but why is a network of local portals spamming?
You're asking why?
Say for example I decide to make a portal about Houston accommodation. The content, is Houston Accommdodation.
Then 6 months later, I decide to make a portal about new York Accommodation. The content, is New York Accommodation.
Then monthly i roll out more sites for big towns.
Are you saying instead of building a new site, I should change my Houston Accommodation site, to Houston - New York Accommodation to avoid duplicate content issues and keep changing its theme. Or that its only a problem if you try and launch all the sites at once... then you should only build one massive site, with no locational theme?
I've seen dozens of networks doing it with no problem. My problem, was doing it poorly.
Personally I am not aware of any AdSense account that has been terminated due to duplicate content or "spamming" Google's database with too many pages. IMO the AdSense side of the corporation is only interested in AdSense issues - i.e. the ability to target ads and drive useful traffic.
Of course you're in a special circumstance, as you were banned and they declined to reinstate you. Since we're stumbling in the dark, I'm not sure anyone here can tell you more about that than you can already surmise.
It's possible to do a single portal that dominates lots of local search results under a single domain because I do it, just like sites such as CitySearch, Yelp, etc., and we manage to do it with a single portal without filling up the web site a bunch of bogus domain names designed just to help it rank (which doesn't always) and the single portal creates a better brand awareness.
For instance, if someone liked your Houston site and wanted to tell someone in Seattle to check out your site, how would they know where to tell them to go?
Ooopsie...
Besides, jomaxx is probably correct that the AdSense team probably wouldn't care.
Thanks for your time on this post. its been most useful to me.
