Forum Moderators: martinibuster

Message Too Old, No Replies

got a "not in compliance" letter

how long until re-review, re-activation?

         

amznVibe

1:21 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I really got a shock today when an email came in from Adsense saying one of sites/pages was not in compliance. For a momement I thought it was like the stories here of complete account closure, but it seems it is just a suspension, my account can still log in and I get the impression the payment will still be coming.

I quickly fixed the page they were refering to and replied per their instructions.

Can anyone tell me how long it will take until my account is serving ads again? It's a shame they suspend all the good pages/sites in compliance on my account along with the one page page/site. You'd think they could just throw on a filter for one specific url.

signup1

1:35 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



It will take 1-2 days for they to review it. If you got a CASE ID in the subject of the message, your will be answered within 4-8 hours.

What did they say about the content? What is your violation?

Encouraging Clicks?
Adult contents?

amznVibe

2:00 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I've never enouraged clicks and adult content is against my personal policy.
They basically said there wasn't enough content on the page.
"We've found that you're displaying Google ads on pages which contain a limited amount of content"

This happened because I was using a template and the adsense code was being inserted into pages that had virtually nothing on them (for now) but apparently people were naviating to.

Completely unintentional but I can see why they might have a problem with that.

Strangely enough I am now seeing ads, but my stats seem to have frozen for the day.

(there is no case number anywhere in the email or in the headers that I can see)

Livenomadic

2:17 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



This happened because I was using a template and the adsense code was being inserted into pages that had virtually nothing on them (for now) but apparently people were naviating to.

I got one of these emails for the same reason you did, my templated site was showing pages with no content.

signup1

2:17 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



that is stupid. if they can not find much content, then the adsense should not be displayed.

are you sure that is the whole story? check the email again to see if they said something else.

It is possible that somebody reported you. The machine can not pick you up.

The ID i am talking about is something like

KWDE-32323WDDS-WEDSDSF

It is an ID used by CRM or helpdesk software. You will see it in the subject or in the message body or hidden in the header.

I do want to follow your case, as I am interested in learning how google take on people for what reason. It seems except Asking For Clicks, or Robot Clicks, google only ban certain pages, not the whoel account.

In the past, in your case, google will just display Public Ads on your site.

elguapo

2:29 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



You're lucky you have not been terminated yet...
If the adsense codes were posted in the blank pages and navigation bars direct your site visitors to these blank pages, it is obvious that you only wanted them to (possibly) click on the ads...granting that they were not PSAs. You know what the problem is. It is unintentional until Google catches it. However, how long has these pages been on line and how much money has it generated for you.

signup1

3:02 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



have you heard anyone got terminated due to placing adsense on blank pages? that is the smallest of the smallest mistakes.

alika

3:08 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



That is a violation. You are putting a code in a blank page. Definitely a no-no. There is no content, no nothing in the page -- just the ads. If there is a created for adsense page, then this is it ("nothing but Adsense ads"). Must be a great income earner for the publisher because there is nothing on the page.

How it is getting theme-based ads at the very least is a weakness in G's part. But they caught it.

that is the smallest of the smallest mistakes.

That is why they are giving the publisher a chance to clean up the site and not booting them immediately. Only shows the fairness of G -- despite what many thinks in this forum

freeflight2

3:30 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



well, like amznVibe said, sometimes technical problems can happen or a site is getting so big that it's impossible to be aware of all pages, especially if users can edit pages etc.

elguapo

3:38 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



funny...well, people always has a lot of reasons when caught...

amznVibe

4:03 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



If the adsense codes were posted in the blank pages and navigation bars direct your site visitors to these blank pages, it is obvious that you only wanted them to (possibly) click on the ads.

There is a good chance you have never run a large, semi-automated website so I will be more gentle in reply than you were in preducially judging me.

If you have content inserted from a database or from external sources in an automated fashion, it is perfectly possible to accidently have blank pages that persist for days, weeks even, until noticed by chance or a 3rd party pointing it out.

A "templated" website means it is generated from a standard form. The adsense code is inserted into every page no matter what.

Here's an easier to understand example of how you can have adsense on a page with no meaningful content. Let's say you have a forum, or even a blog, that uses adsense next to each thread. Now let's say someone goes in and posts a message. Adsense then scans that page and starts displaying ads based on that message. Then the person decides what they said was wrong or a dupe and they go in and delete the content of the message. Well it's a huge forum so 100's of people go in and look at that thread. But nothing is there, yet ads are showing. People click on the ads. There is no way you intended that to happen. It's a page without content, displaying adsense and people are clicking anyway cause there is little else to see.

I just noticed my stats have updated slightly. So either they saw my fix and allowed the ads to resume, or they realized it was an innocent mistake. Maybe the day has to finish out. I've never had this happen so I dunno, hence asking for other experiences.

ps. there really is no case number or help desk code inserted, I double checked. I know it's a real email from Google cause they used my special adsense email and addressed me by first name. (There is a buried complex number next to the word JavaMail in the email which may help route it back to the agent that did the analysis.)

It is probably important to point out that this email was alot more "easygoing" than some of the other posts I have read around here. This may just be Google saying "look we know you didn't mean harm, but we have to enforce the rules".

Jenstar

5:57 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



if they can not find much content, then the adsense should not be displayed.
are you sure that is the whole story?

Many webmasters have received this same warning that amznVibe received, for the simple fact of there not being enough content on the page. This has popped up numerous times in the past couple of months. Yes, AdSense ads will often display on the page (using the nav/header/footer text for example, or showing themed ads), but the point is that there is no useful content for a visitor on that page.

And it is common for webmasters to do this - without deliberate intentions to try and cheat AdSense. When updating or adding new changes, it can be quite easy to upload a page with little or no content other than header/footer/navigation. These are often done for placeholders for future content. Or the forums with a post that someone decides to remove. And also as amznVibe said, the intentions were not there for anyone to happen to view those page prior to the actual content being added.

Jesse_Smith

6:09 am on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member




That is a violation. You are putting a code in a blank page. Definitely a no-no. There is no content, no nothing in the page -- just the ads.

There are reasons to do it with out breaking the rules. You do know what SSI is, right?! They once E-mailed me about that cause some how the page had been loged (a cgi file, not txt) and I told them about SSI and of course they understood.

Livenomadic

12:42 pm on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Here's an easier to understand example of how you can have adsense on a page with no meaningful content. Let's say you have a forum, or even a blog, that uses adsense next to each thread. Now let's say someone goes in and posts a message. Adsense then scans that page and starts displaying ads based on that message. Then the person decides what they said was wrong or a dupe and they go in and delete the content of the message. Well it's a huge forum so 100's of people go in and look at that thread. But nothing is there, yet ads are showing. People click on the ads. There is no way you intended that to happen. It's a page without content, displaying adsense and people are clicking anyway cause there is little else to see.

Exactly. It is not an intentional page, it is in fact a page which the admin deleted when he sees it, BUT for some period of time that page exsists.

Google has the absolutely right to say "Hey, get rid of my ad on that page, or get rid of that page". However to suggest that google will ban a site EVERY TIME this infraction occurs is stupidity.

Why? Because if this was true, AmznVibe just described a way to ban 80% of my competition from adsense. Google isn't that stupid.

alika

5:00 pm on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



There are reasons to do it with out breaking the rules. You do know what SSI is, right?!

Yes, Jesse_Smith. I DO know SSI.

Perhaps with Adsense and G constantly watching our pages, we need to be more vigilant if we are using these tools and we are inadvertently creating pages we must not. But this case only proves that G can be very reasonable and will not just kick out publishers from the program "on a whim" as some paranoid publishers are saying in the "Terrified by G?" thread.

ronin

8:45 pm on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



You shouldn't have any problems, amznVibe.
Google contacted me a while back (while I was on holiday actually!) about a searchbox which was pre-filled on my site.

I wrote back to them and asked them to tell me the page, because as far as I was aware I had no pre-filled searchboxes.

They told me it was:

[mysite.com...]

I deleted the page and then wrote back to them to tell them that when AdSense for Search was first introduced, I had modified the suggested code, posted it on a sample orphan page - that's why I called it "google.html" - and asked them to review it for acceptability. At that time they had written back and said that pre-filling the searchbox was unacceptable, so when I subsequently deployed searchboxes across my site, I did not fill in the query box.

I told them that the offending page, now deleted, had been a page "for their eyes only" and had never been linked to from the rest of the site.

They wrote back to me to thank me for my explanation and to tell me that there were no further problems.

All in all, a very civil exchange.

walrus

8:56 pm on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



They definitley give you a chance too fix things,Ive made a couple mistakes including the click my own ad twice(over 6 months , notified them both times)and they
blocked ads on one page once and after i edited the page they put the ads back,no problem.
Generally they'll people get a chance to correct mistakes.

amznVibe

11:17 pm on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I am pleased to report less than 24 hours later I've gotten a reply and all is well now. To paraphrase their return email, they thanked me for making the changes and complying with the adsense policy.

Now I am not sure the ads were ever turned off during this time. My per click income is way down since that first email but now I am starting to suspect its the "end of month" shutdown by advertisers who have blown their budget.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement from others (recently) here.

freeflight2

11:25 pm on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



glad to hear that... one way to catch these kind of things is to watch your logfiles (or better have a process watching it for you reporting delivered html files with sizes less than 4k or so)

ken_b

11:27 pm on Oct 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



amznVibe:

I'm glad this worked out well for you.

I also want to thank you for posting the results. It helps to offset some of the negative postings about account suspensions, etc.