Possible reasons for "mystery" Adsense bans

[Marcia]

I suspect that some Adsense accounts might be terminated because of content policy violations that may or may not be clear enough for the Adsense TOS and/or could possibly slip by publishers.

Take a look at the content policies for Google Checkout, it's pretty thorough:

[checkout.google.com...]

There are some there that I don't recall off-hand seeing in the Adsense list of what is or isn't acceptable. Nevertheless, if anything is questionable I guess it can't hurt to cross-check with other Google offerings with regard to suitability.

[Leonard0]

Interesting, especially the travel category

Travel packages and offers Tours (including hotel, flight, and car reservations), travel clubs, and timeshare properties

Wonder what's the problem with that?

[MetalType]

Interesting. You can see the reasons for most, but I think the Travel Packages section should just include travel clubs.

[koan]

I don't know how relevant it really is with Adsense. You can't use Checkout to sell animals, investments services, precious stones, protected cultural items, travel packages, currencies, yet I'm sure a web site on these topics is not prohibited from using Adsense.

[icedowl]

At first glance I was puzzled by Timeshares being included in the Travel Packages section. But that was before I had my coffee and thought about the 12 years I spent working for a Property Management company at Tahoe. The company managed a number of homeowner associations and one of them was a timeshare. Timeshares have all the same bills (utilities, property taxes, etc.) that any individual homeowner has to contend with. They have yearly maintenance fees to cover the utilities, taxes, landscaping, snow removal, housekeeping and management. They also have special assessments for painting, roof replacement and other special projects. In other words, a lot of work is involved.

Timeshares are a section of real estate and to buy one, one must do all the same things with titles, title searches, etc. that anyone who buys a home has to go through. That stuff simply cannot be completed online considering all the paperwork involved. Any form of an online check-out can't handle all the legal stuff that is involved. Much of the paperwork needs to be notarized and/or recorded.

Nothing wrong that I can see with advertising them online, just the completion of a sale needs things that aren't of an online nature.

[martinibuster]

There are travel club scams targeting senior citizens. They ask for five or ten thousand dollars up front to join the travel clubs that supposedly offer them secret bargains on travel (hotels, cruises, flights, etc.).

[Marcia]

There are also investment scams, oil & gas deals and Ponzi schemes that deliberately target senior citizens. When they telemarket, they don't even want to talk to anyone under 55 who isn't an aggressive, accredited investor.

Another thing is "miracle cures" and remedies that have no legitimate, recognized substantiated value. With all the herbal remedy programs floating around, that would have to be an area to come under very close scrutiny for content suitability.

[edited by: Marcia at 7:52 am (utc) on Sep. 7, 2008]

[StoutFiles]

Another reason would be that people are doing sketchy things, get caught, then plead innocent.

[netmeg]

Yea, I ran up against the pyrotechnics issue for one of my sites, and had to explain that I don't sell them, I just tell people where the community displays are. Google figured it out and hasn't had a problem since. YPN never did figure it out. The interesting thing is that there are some pyrotechnics companies that advertise on my site. I'm not sure why they're allowed in AdWords but not AdSense.

[LifeinAsia]

Interesting, especially the travel category

Travel packages and offers Tours (including hotel, flight, and car reservations), travel clubs, and timeshare properties

Wonder what's the problem with that?

Because:
1) the travel industry gets a lot of chargebacks (a person stays at a hotel and room service is 2 minutes later- rather than complain to the manager, they just dispute the entire bill with their credit card company, especially if they booked through an online agency)
2) the travel industry has a lot of fly-by-night operators that charge customers a lot of money then close shop before paying the suppliers

Most traditional credit card processing companies won't touch travel agents, so it makes sense that Google Checkout doesn't want to deal with the hassle either.

[jetteroheller]

I'm not sure why they're allowed in AdWords but not AdSense

My filter contains over 100 MLM sites blocked.
They are not allowed in AdSense, but there are far to much of them using AdWords.

[robzilla]

Nice find. I don't think it has much to do with the "Banned from Adsense" topics we've seen recently, which really weren't very mysterious at all, but it's certainly good to keep in mind what Google considers unsuitable for Checkout and, perhaps, to some extent, other Google services.