Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've been running adsense program from the beginning and have always played by the rule.
For a couple of years, it has been a very good revenue.
Then it started going down, more and more and now, I'm thinking...ahhhh...why even bother trying to talk to these guys ?
Did anyone ever get re-instated or even get an answer ?
I'm a little curious, did you update your privacy page for the April 8 deadline?
Should I have ? Was that mandatory ?
They always shut you down and let you stew for a few days and then notify you, they want it to hurt.
I was shut down for a month last Christmas for some meta tag and layout infractions. It took them about 5 business days to get me the standard email and then I replied and was hooked up with a "consultant". It took me 3 weeks and 3 tries until I had a version of my site approved but I was put back up but managed to loose 5 figures. A slap on the wrist they know I'll never forget. Of course I was making them a lot of cash so I might have got some rope because of it.
[edited by: Khensu at 10:39 pm (utc) on April 12, 2009]
FarmBoy
Finger pointing at other offenders will not get you re-instated, it won't help your cause. The best advice anyone can give you here is to tell you to get a proper privacy policy page happening ASAP
So they can't automate a system to search sites for privacy policies with whatever text is necessary.
They would need to manually review each publisher's site and that would need to be done by someone with enough expertise to judge whether each site's policy is worded properly for the situation, and that would seem to be a daunting task.
FarmBoy
Jim
Traffic and revenues were so low this past weeks
Sounds like Google decided you weren't a good fit for the program. They do this to protect advertisers from sites that don't produce sales.
If that is the case Google will have to disable thousands of accounts in addition to this one. I know accounts with a few cents of diary revenues and still running AS.
thx for your postings
I put the proper privacy policy page on the site (btw, i wasn't fingerpointing, i was just noticing)
I know accounts with a few cents of diary revenues and still running AS.
No need to get scatological here ;)
I just wanted to point out that as far as I know G does not disable accounts based on revenues.
Maybe, but Google might very well disable accounts because of low conversions and/or clicks of questionable value. For example, if a site mostly gets most of its advertisers from the Widget Republic but has a disproportionate number of clicks from Elbonia, Google might figure that advertisers' best interests aren't being served.
I tried to get re-instated by filling the form, but since I didn't know why my account was disabled, what could I say for my defense ?
They replied, saying my account was a threat for their publishers and yada yada yada, there was nothing I could do.
Than last week it just hit me: I have a colleague that is in charge for our clients google adwords campaigns and I asked her if there was something she could do for me ?
So i gave her my publisher ID and she asked her contact at Google Adwords who asked his contact at Google Adsense what was wrong with that account and after a few days, the contact at Google Adwords forwarded an answer from his contact at Adsense, to my colleague...
It turns out that my Adsense account has been disabled for invalid clicks and if I can't come up with a strong case to defend my self, there is no way that I can get my adsense account re-instated.
Interesting, isn't it ?
At least now I know why my account is disabled.
My first reflex was to start digging the server logs and my analytics account and, what do I find out ?
There is one suspiscious page, with 1 page impression - 8 clicks: Total revenue for that page: 0.56 €
Now, I have been member of the adsense program since the beginning and they know it so the question is:
1. Wouldn't I have to be stupid to click repeatetely on the same add for 0.56 € at the risk of loosing my account ?
2. Why did they never tell me that my account was disabled for invalid clicks in the first place ?
3. Are they still honest and fair at Google? I mean: should I even bother talking to these guys ?
Anyway, I wanted to share this with you
Now that I made that clear.
I have seen this several times before. The probable reason your revenue was so low before you were booted was because G was probably showing a lot of PSA's except for some honeypot ads to test whatever theory they had about your ad displays being a threat to their clients. They can disable specific ad locations very easily (*see below for the reason)and often do so without banning the publisher. ALL of the other times that I have seen this happen where I personally knew the details of the site it was obvious that this was traffic that G does NOT want.
The only ones who ever got a second chance that I know personally, had traffic that G wanted very badly but they had clearly violated the TOS in some way.
Just my 2 cents
*Someone can easily view your source, copy your adsense code and post it on a bad page to get you in trouble. Google knows this is a possibility so they would simply stop serving ads to pages on the badguys version of your ad.This could be mitigated by letting publishers see the URLs where their ads are appearing (why this info is not available to publishers baffles me. Am I missing something?)
his could be mitigated by letting publishers see the URLs where their ads are appearing (why this info is not available to publishers baffles me. Am I missing something?)
The "Allowed Sites" feature (under "AdSense Setup" in the publisher control panel) should make that unnecessary. Check the "Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account" option and enter the URLs that are permitted to show ads for your account.
thank you people, for reacting to this.
It's been 2 months now, and i can assure you i got over it, at least enough to be able to talk about it without being bitter.
There is one thing though, that has been on my mind every time I've been searching around tor info about disabled account: it seems that Google always has a good reason for doing something, even when they do the wrong thing.
I may assure you that the websites I run, well, Google should want that traffic badly because I've had several of their advertisers writing to me directly, asking me what it should cost to advertise on my sites without having to use Adwords.
Samanthatouch,
of course you've seen this several times before but well, the last psa I've seen on my sites, that was years ago.
For a couple of years, Adsense used to be an interesting second job (and I mean around 100 $ / a day, revenue)
Then it started to slow down to half of that for one year or so
And for the last year, it sunk to 10$ to 15$ a day.
Without cheating and with just 1, sometimes 2 ad units on a page.
Often I surf on sites where all I see is Google ad units first and then I have to scroll down to read the content:
Often I surf on sites with unreadable articles because they are stuffed with specific keywords and they don't make any sense at all
And how do you get out of these useless websites ?
You click on an ad of course.
Is this what they call protecting their advertisers ?
hmmm...I really wonder...
They are lucky that Microsoft and Yahoo do not do better
signor_john, this is correct but if this is the case with a 5 years old account, they should just talk with you in case of problem, and not just ignore you.
Gandhalf, I was responding to Samanthatouch, who apparently wasn't aware of the "Allowed Sites" feature.
As for why your site was disabled for invalid clicks, that's something that none of us is in a position to know, but I'd point out that "invalid" doesn't necessarily mean "fraudulent." It could simply mean that clicks from your site have an unusually low conversion rate, for example (which could occur for any number of reasons, such as a large number of readers in third-world countries, below the age of 10, or whatever). And while it might be nice if Google would give you more details, Google probably wants to avoid sharing such information for two reasons: (1) to avoid getting into a long and unproductive dialogue, and (2) to avoid playing into the hands of "bad guys" who'd like to exploit the system through testing and reverse engineering. (Maybe you're the most honest guy in the world, but how does Google know that your brother-in-law or best buddy isn't a "bad guy" who's looking over your shoulder?)
Not to mention the fact that most sites show up in SE cache, or displayed via anonymous proxy sites, etc. so there's no way to actually determine if any invalid clicks were issued to your AdSense code by looking at your log file alone, it's insufficient.
I've been with Adsense for years so sometimes when I see an old channel pop up in my reports, I can't remember where that one is (I should have given them better names). I'd like to be able to see the url of the page where the stats came from.
Blogger offers an option to monetize their free blogs without any word about adding a privacy policy or even adding one automatically
google does it for their bloggers.
look at the bottom of the blogger main page (also has a link to google's central policy).
there is noway I could even ask Google why they did this ?
You can file a suit and force them to answer or lose.
