Banned from Adsense, Did nothing wrong. What to do?

[happyHunter]

Hi all,

I'm new here, so please be gentle. I'm just after a bit of wise advice. :)

I started my first site at the beginning of last year. I built it up with original content and a lot of time consuming work. I made the website because it was something I was interested in and enjoyed doing. Soon I realised that I could have my server fees paid if I put ads on the site.

After I started to get a little traffic I applied and was approved for Adsense. Everything was going fine with traffic increasing steadily until June last year when I got a sudden spike in traffic from Google search.

Checking my Adsense dashboard it suggested that my most visited page was slow, and to improve site performance. So I did. BTW. I'm using wordpress.

I installed a caching plugin in mid July and started using cloudflare. I must say at that point in time I was getting up to 200 times as many visitors as I normally did, and about 99.5% of them were from Google. By early August the traffic had dropped slightly, then bam. I woke one morning to find my account was disabled.

I immediately appealed, as I had a huge day approaching, and quickly went to the Adsense forum and searched as much as I could for a solution, but due to other circumstances of the day my mind was elsewhere.

I think I found the problem with the help of the Adsense forum. It appears as though the problem was that mod_cloudflare wasn't installed. And it couldn't be either with my shared hosting. After several emails I was finally told about a plugin to restore origin visitors ip, but it was too late. My appeal was rejected.

I filed a couple more appeals off, and they were promptly rejected within 10 minutes of the following hour. In frustration I approached my local MP, Minister of Fair Trading, and also his department. Surprisingly, Google initially failed to even respond to the government department. After 2 months they did respond and affirmed their initial response. That has left me with two options.

The department, and another federal department also have advised me to take them to a tribunal where a legally enforceable judgement can be handed down. I was advised that certain parts of the contracts may be created in such a way that they may be determined to be unfair, and unenforceable by law. The thing is, I don't want to make an enemy of someone I want to do business with.

I really don't care about the money I had already earned, I care about future potential as the visitors to my site have grown significantly since August. I now get in a day what I was getting in a week or two.

PS. I have ads from other networks and have had no problems at all.

What should I do? Give up and move on, create a business account with my business name, tax id and so on, or go to the tribunal?

[IanCP]

Yes he will, he will have made an enemy, a serious mistake if that enemy is G.

And he will have gained nothing because whatever the tribunal awards will never be enforced

From memory, the OP is an Australian like myself. I have a fair idea of what Tribunal he is speaking of.

I can guarantee you that any decision they make will not only be enforced, but it will be accepted with "good grace".

Slowly, ever so slowly, the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft and a great many others are learning that Australian commercial standards aren't the "wild west - anything they want goes" they might formerly have been used to.

Among many things, the philosophy that Google or others can make up the rules as they go along and you're/we're stuck with them doesn't actually apply.

The Australian media rarely report the findings of the ACCC - even when issued with press releases. One can only assume they don't want to embarrass advertisers, but there been some massive fines and orders handed down over the years.

Believe me, they're enforceable - and are to be taken in good grace without any retribution whatsoever.

[nomis5]

Maybe, lets hope Happy Hunter reports back here if he takes G to a tribunal. I for one will be interested to know the result and am sure that many others will also. Then we will have a real life documented example of how it all went.

And I've never doubted the Australian system and that in the UK are similar and both are well regarded. I was not aware the Australian market in the past was thought of as the Wild West, interesting comment.

I really, honestly would love to read the story on Webmasterworld along the lines of "I'm a small publisher who took G to a tribunal, won, was awarded damages and had my disabled account reinstated". I've not seen it to date but maybe someone can post a link if they know of one.

[tangor]

Just checking... Tribunal=Small Claims (US) court. Yes, any decisions will be legally binding.

I've looked at this thread a few times over the last few days to see how it developed and where it might go. Intriguing.

What is more intriguing is how the jump "sent by google" happened in the first place. I have a feeling that not all of the story has been told and that some information that might be embarrassing has been withheld. That said, it appears that getting booted off adsense was the best thing that could happen to the OP. There are other avenue streams to mine and it appears there's been success in that regard.

[jbayabas]

Even if the OP wins in court, he will never get his account reinstated. Once you click agree to the Terms and Conditions, you won't stand a chance.

[happyHunter]

I've been tied up with work, family, and sleep, and I didn't realise this had gone to page 2, so I kind of left it thinking there had been no more posts.

IanCP is spot on with his comments. If I do take them to a tribunal and if I did win, G always have a right of appeal. Once it's in that domain the legal expenses can build. It'd be something both sides would have to seriously weigh up if the fight at that stage would be worth it. I'm not so sure if I would be willing to pay a lawyer, risk losing and be faced with paying G's legal fees. G would also have to consider if it's really worth spending what would be a small fortune to many just to keep one person out. you don't get rich writing checks after all.

I have a feeling that not all of the story has been told.

I can guarantee that it all came from G. When I checked the Adsense dashboard it said my top page was slow. I installed W3 Total Cache and spent nearly an entire night fiddling with the minify, js and page cache settings. In doing so I never went near the ad code, mainly because I thought to do so would be a violation of the tos. That night I also started using Cloudflare. About 2 weeks later it was all over for me as far as Adsense was concerned.

The page that got all of the traffic is still my top search term in webmaster tools. In saying that, it has dropped to below 5, where it was moving between the top 3 during the sudden peak. That post sometimes makes my top 10 these days, even though it still appears more than any other post in the searches.

Once you click agree to the Terms and Conditions, you won't stand a chance.

Not necessarily. In Australia if it's a standard form contract (as Adsense is), its a take it or leave it contract (as Adsense is), enforcing a term in the contract can result in a loss to the consumer or contractor, and the party enforcing the term of the contract can prove a significant loss if the term isn't enforced (would it have been a significant loss and will G provide that information, as revealing it publicly could allow intentional violators to use the information to circumvent their detection systems), then it can be ruled to be unfair. If the tribunal or a court find that the contract is unfair, G basically won't stand a chance and could be forced to rewrite the terms of the contract for all publishers in Australia. Another costly and difficult exercise I would think. The ACCC and the department of Fair Trading both have pages on their websites explaining it.

I will keep you informed if I decide to go to the tribunal. I'd much rather prefer to sort it out with G face to face, but they're a bit like God (if you believe in God). They're everywhere but nowhere to be found.

[jpch]

Wouldn't it be ironic if Australian Publishers started taking Google to court and Google just decided to end the AdSense for Publishers program in Australia. Kind of like all the states here in the United States that decided to tax Amazon so Amazon ended the affiliate program in those states.

[IanCP]

I was not aware the Australian market in the past was thought of as the Wild West

I was actually referring to other jurisdictions overseas where peoples rights aren't paramount.

Once you click agree to the Terms and Conditions, you won't stand a chance

People who write contracts and think they have it all sewn up in their favour often receive a very nasty shock in Australia - particularly all one sided contracts.

My personal all time favourite was the one where well known finance companies thought they could make up their own rules in contracts. Despite repeated formal warnings from the government departments they persisted.

The end result was the Minister concerned made findings against them. What then happened was:

a) all contracts null and void.
b) all interest charges, fees etc. had to be credited back to the consumer. This included finished contracts entered into after a certain beginning date.
c) after those credits were passed, and every payment made was deducted. Any surplus had to be refunded to the consumer. That is, principal sum of the original loan, minus subsequent payments.
d) In the event, after those deductions, there was still a balance owing on the principal sum - "the consumer could decide whether they would bother paying it back voluntarily".

Nothing thereafter was enforceable.

Corporations [some subsidiaries of banks], went into liquidation.

The stupid, irrational part? Ignoring repeated written warnings against unconscionable conduct.

No sympathy from anyone. I actually made money out of that by buying shares in one of them when they plunged down to 33 cents overnight, it was a bank subsidiary and I punted on the fact the bank would have to take them over to save face. Nominal face value of the shares was 50 cents - that was the takeover price about a week later. Lateral thinking!

[EditorialGuy]

A lot of people use CloudFlare, I just think I'd have heard if there was a huge AdSense issue there.

I've used Cloudflare with AdSense on my static site for quite a while (without mod_cloudflare in my Apache .htaccess file), and I haven't had any problems with or without Rocket Loader enabled. YMMV.

From 200 pv a day to 10k for the duration of two months is highly suspicious.

Let's give the OP the benefit of the doubt and assume that the traffic increase isn't suspicious in itself. Google might still want to disable the OP's account if low-quality traffic were generating an unusually high number of junk clicks. Protecting advertisers is likely to be more important to Google than placating publishers.

[happyHunter]

I actually made money out of that by buying shares in one of them

Clever. I need to pay more attention to financial news.

Google just decided to end the AdSense for Publishers program in Australia

That would be a massive over reaction by Google and it would cost them millions every day. Australia's not the biggest market in the world, but it's a tier 1 country with a lot of Adwords customers who would start using other means to advertise their brand if the program were to close. Making the contract fair has nothing to do with a poor return

[netmeg]

The problem would be the precedent it would set.

[LuckyLiz]

Is the page that gets so much traffic a blog post that has responses? If so, have you looked at all the responses and any links posted in the responses or attached to the names of the people posting?

If this is a blog post with responses, it's possible your account was disabled because of text in a response to the post or a link to an undesirable site.

[EditorialGuy]

A comment about "one-sided contracts":

AdSense's contract lets publishers (not just Google) end the relationship at any time.

IMHO, that's much less one-sided than fixed-term contracts where the publisher is locked into the contract but the ad network or rep firm can bail simply by saying (explicitly or implicitly), "Do you really want to be leave your fate in the hands of a company that's lost interest in selling ads on your site?"

[wa desert rat]

AdSense's contract lets publishers (not just Google) end the relationship at any time.

A "one-sided contract" is one that reserves all important rights to one party and only token "rights" to the other party (or parties). Especially if it's a click-through contract. I don't think that simply being able to cancel the contract would necessarily move the contract up a notch.

I have wondered for some time about Google's ability to cancel a contract and withhold all funds with no warnings and little recourse (a one-sided appeal).

The idea that HappyHunter would make an "enemy" of Google is one side of the coin. It's also entirely possible that HappyHunter would be tagged as someone they should not push around.

In the USA it would take litigation, appellate courts and massive lawyer fees. But in Australia, apparently, it takes AU$38 and the government takes over. HH is not actually suing Google, after all. Asking a Tribunal to investigate as to whether G stepped over the line (legally speaking) is not the same thing.

I still think HH has little to lose and his/her account back to win.

WDR

[happyHunter]

have you looked at all the responses and any links posted in the responses or attached to the names of the people posting?

At that point in time I had Facebook comments installed, and I think I had to delete only 1 spam comment about getting rich online. Other than that they were only normal comments. Aside from that I was disabled for invalid activity, not a policy violation.

The problem would be the precedent it would set.

I prefer to look at it not as a problem, but clarifying a question many are already wondering.

The idea that HappyHunter would make an "enemy" of Google is one side of the coin. It's also entirely possible that HappyHunter would be tagged as someone they should not push around.

In reality I doubt they would think twice about it. If I got back in I'd just be thrown back into the mix with everyone else. If not, I'm really nothing to them, just as I am now. I really think they have bigger things to worry about than a small publisher like me.

Personally I'd definitely prefer to be able to contact G directly, either with an email or phone call to resolve the impasse. That would be a much better way for both parties to proceed. But they just have no way for anyone to contact the Adsense department. By allowing it to proceed to a tribunal G are running a bit of a risk. If they lose it could open the flood gates. If I take them on and lose, I haven't lost anything I don't already have.

[cbpayne]

If you take this to the Tribunal, the worse that will happen to Google is that they will be forced to hand over any money you allegedly "earnt" before you were disabled. The Tribunal can not force Google to continue to buy advertising space off you.

[wa desert rat]

The Tribunal can not force Google to continue to buy advertising space off you.

What do you base this upon?

WDR

[cbpayne]

The Tribunal can not force you to eat at certain restaurant or buy at a particular supermarket. Why can it force anyone to buy advertising space of a website?

Google can terminate buying advertising (ie Adsense) at any time. If Google no longer want to buy advertising space off any website they want, they can stop it at anytime for any reason.

[wa desert rat]

Oh... I thought you might know of some legal reason.

WDR

[nomis5]

There's no need for a legal reason, if they want to stop doing business with you they can and will, at the drop of a hat.

I certainly wouldn't do business with someone who took me to a tribunal - they might just do it again!

[wa desert rat]

It appears that in Australia courts and tribunals can determine whether a term in a contract is fair or unfair, strike that term from the contract, and order that the contract be continued without that term.

It depends upon the circumstances and jurisdiction and some definitions and is subject to appeal by both parties, of course.

Even in the USA courts can order companies and corporations to change the way they do business. Like allowing blacks to eat in a restaurant or an employee fired without just cause to get his/her job back with back pay.

It all depends on the circumstances and the relevant laws.

WDR