Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The page they directed me to indicated the site was breaking the ToS because of the way I was trying to improve my Serps position rather than anything wrong with the site itself. I have asked them to clarify this so I can ensure its not repeated but have had no response.
We know that if an Adsense account is disabled/shutdown etc by Google then any earnings earned are NOT paid to the publisher. Does anyone know what happens if just a site is banned from adsense but the account remains open?
Tell us more on your ways of 'improving the serps', maybe we can tell you what went wrong.
[edited by: Hobbs at 12:20 pm (utc) on April 20, 2008]
Tell us more on your ways of 'improving the serps',
This has me intrigued too considering with what many are seemingly allowed to get away.
One page out of several sites? Strange, very strange!
When the site appeared to drop from the serps I changed the directory structure of the site and used 301 redirects to redirect users from old urls to new and the new urls where being indexed.
I have asked the adsense support to confirm if my assumptions are correct and confirmed that I would not repeat this if that was the case but as of yet have not had a response.
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:28 pm (utc) on April 20, 2008]
[edit reason] See TOS. Don't do it again please. [/edit]
One page out of several sites? Strange, very strange!
It was one whole site out of many site, not a single page. My other sites earn me very little compared to this one site which is the main reason I wanted to get this site back into the serps.
The page they directed me to indicated the site was breaking the ToS
Ok, I understood it as being one page.
I changed the directory structure of the site and used 301 redirects to redirect users from old urls to new and the new urls where being indexed.
Therefore you are assuming it is the 301s that have caused this penalty since you cannot see anything else that may be:
trying to improve my Serps position
Why would 301s create this problem? Am I missing something here or is there something about 301s that I am not aware?
This is the full W3 definition:
10.3.2 301 Moved PermanentlyThe requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.
The new permanent URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s).
If the 301 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Note: When automatically redirecting a POST request after
receiving a 301 status code, some existing HTTP/1.0 user agents
will erroneously change it into a GET request.
At times the AdSense team are frustrating when they do not give a clear indication of what they perceive as a TOS infringement.
I just have this feeling it is possibly something else.
This was site wide, not just a single url, as 90% of the pages where droped from the serps, actually only those above the /info directory remained in the serps.
Doing this did get the url re-indexed and back in a good position in the Serps.
This has happened a couple of times in the past 18 months, the first time I assumed the site had been dropped because of a server/host change which incurred some downtime, the last time was the mid March 2008, had no obvious reason for it but appeared to be short lived as urls where dropping out again so I reverted back to the original directory structure. Then within a matter of weeks I got THE email.
Other items Google listed as 'possible reasons' included using 'multiple doorway pages' and 'participating in link schemes designed to increase rankings' neither of which are methods I have ever used.
Looking back, maybe I was to 'hasty' in reverting back to the original and maybe Google has looked at this as some kind of 'trick', but I really don't know.
3 questions:
- were you redirecting based on user agent - cloaking
(get someone you trust to look at the method
No, it was the same straight forward 301 redirect, in my httpd.conf file, for every visitor, be it a bot or a human using a browser, text or otherwise.
- do you still have the same dupe content on the old urls?
The old urls are NOT accessible now, anyone visiting them is redirected.
- what else did you try for better rankings?
Nothing - well I submit a google sitemap to webmaster tools regularly and have an html sitemap on the site.
SEO has never been my forte hence other sites of mine never doing well at all in the serps, when I first launched this site I was suprised at how quick and well it was indexed and to this day I don't really understand why.
I have removed adsense and will keep them off until I have found out what I am doing wrong. This is one reason I have emailed Google, hoping they can through some more light on it.
Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines did not exist?"
If search engines did not exist we would get less scrapers and content thieves and the countermeasures they force us to use, servers would run faster, there would be no reasons to put up robots.txt or use keyword and description META tags. Their answer is too general.
If the pages were removed from the SERPs in the first place, then you used redirects to get them back in, and you've done this twice with the same content, then I suspect that the redirects are NOT your problem as the problem started before you put those redirects into place.
Go through the points on the guidelines page, one at a time. Check to see if you are doing anything to violate what they say. Don't just decide that you don't do it, actually go through all your pages and check. Did you or someone else accidentally put hidden text on a page? It doesn't have to invisible, just difficult to find or make out is plent to get you in trouble. Do that for every item listed.
They sent me to [google.com...] and also listed the 'quality guideline' points in the email.
I have read through each of the 'quality guideline' points more than once and apart from the redirects, I am struggling to think what else it could be.
Heck I am not giving up, my problem is how do I know when I have found the answer? ie the site is currently indexed in the SERPs, it is just adsense that has blocked the site.
You might have discovered a new facet of banning reasons, sad to say. I hope someone here can help you find the reason(s)and get you back in G's good graces. Never the less, this might be a very important thread for all of us to watch.
Thanks
At times the AdSense team are frustrating when they do not give a clear indication of what they perceive as a TOS infringement.
As far as payments went, I believe I was paid for each site that was knocked out of the program. So the "violations" could not have been anything hysterical.
An employee trying to justify their existence, perhaps?
He has replaced AdSense on that site with Bidvertiser ads and he just was notified of invalid clicks from Bidvertiser and Bidvertiser gave him a list of 6 IP addresses that were generating those invalid clicks. 5 of the 6 IP addresses belong to Google and they are not the Googlebot. Bidvertiser has blocked those IP addresses but he was asked to take appropriate action to prevent invalid clicks.
Since the site was dropped from Google serps I am not getting that number of impressions, its nearer 10% of that.
I'm definitely not questioning the validity of your other post. Just think it's odd that you didn't post about it here where your privacy is protected yet you posted on the AdSense Help Forums where your privacy is not protected.
generating those invalid clicks 5 of the 6 IP addresses belong to Google and they are not the Googlebot
care to elaborate?
Google was clicking Bidvertiser ads?
I posted there in the hope that an adsensepro may respond, as apparently they have a few monitoring that forum. Google do not appear to answer emails and I wanted to figure out what was going on.
Hobs
To be honest, I don't know. The message from bidvertiser was :
BidVertiser said the invalid clicks were generated from the following
IP(s):
218.111.59.xx, 66.249.85.69 , 74.125.16.39 , 72.14.193.4 , 72.14.195.225 , 66.249.84.14
and that they are now blocked in their system
Now 5 out of the 6 IP addresses are registered to Google, when I checked my server logs none of them had the Googlebot User Agent but instead had a useragent of
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv: 1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14"
It could be that someone has spoofed their IP address but it just seems a coincidence.
[edited by: jatar_k at 1:15 pm (utc) on April 22, 2008]
[edit reason] no email quotes and obfuscated 1 IP [/edit]
they said my site was in violation of their programm policies, it is no longer eligible for participation in the AdSense programme but my account is still open.
[edited by: jatar_k at 1:17 pm (utc) on April 22, 2008]
[edit reason] no email quotes [/edit]
These are all familiar IP's for anyone running AdSense and receiving traffic from Google, Bidvertiser ads could have been clicked by people using Google's wireless transcoder, Google translate .. I am surprised Bidvertiser is not already familiar with those IPs.
On the other hand, what Bidvertiser just did, by communicating clearly to you what the problem is, and even disclosing the IPs that caused it (vs. banning you with no details) is admirable, perhaps Google should should take a page off Bidvertiser's work manual.
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461; .NET CLR 2.0.50727),gzip(gfe) (via translate.google.com)"
Well if you are correct that does answer that concern.
These are all familiar IP's for anyone running AdSense and receiving traffic from Google, Bidvertiser ads could have been clicked by people using Google's wireless transcoder, Google translate .. I am surprised Bidvertiser is not already familiar with those IPs.
it is no longer eligible for participation in the AdSense programme.
Oh! What have you changed or what does Google now no longer deem eligible?
Have you any idea?
But the rest of your sites are ok...the mystery deepens!
Ooh I have just got a really informative email from Google as to why the site was banned
You got the exact same email that I did!
cgiscripts4u, why don't you ask Bidvertiser if those IPs are generating invalid clicks on other Bidvertiser accounts as well? If the above is the issue, it would certainly be prevalent throughout their network. It would also be prevalent throughout AdSense so how would Google determine which clicks are valid and which aren't?
I did email Bidvertiser informing them that 5 of the IP's belonged to google and they replied within 24 hours confirming that they will be removing the block on those IP addresses.
