Problems with invalid traffic on Adsense

[daniel1213]

Hello,

We have a very big problem. In the last few weeks, we have detected the activity of some robots on the website that spammed us a lot. In this sense, we probably received a penalty, as our income dropped SUBSTANTIALLY, by more than 75-80%.

I managed to get in touch with someone from Google. We are facing a problem that does not depend on us. "Invalid traffic" was reported to us on the website. More than 3 weeks ago, including yesterday, I received waves of SPAM comments on the website. Most likely these bots generated invalid traffic for us and today our incomes are on the ground, independently of us. No matter how much we tried to block these bots, they appeared again with other IPs, most likely they work through a proxy. How should I proceed in this situation?

Our predominant traffic is from mobile and the invalid traffic was detected from desktop.

We have predominant traffic from a certain country, and the invalid traffic is with ips from other countries (various countries)

We are in good faith and have a very good history at Google of over 14 months of activity with substantial income, without warnings or other policy violations.

How should we proceed so that we can request a traffic analysis, or... anything else that would put us back in the normal line of work.

Is there a penalty that expires after a period?

[dolcevita]

Cloudflare is a very effective remedy against bots and invalid traffic. Don't wait, switch to CF today. Once you switch and if you need some advice for settings to reduce disabled traffic there, let me know.

[edited by: dolcevita at 12:42 pm (utc) on Feb 23, 2024]

[daniel1213]

thank you. But still.. how could I solve my current situation with Google Adsense? I have absolutely no fault for this situation. I didn't even know about this traffic.

[dolcevita]

Apologize and say that you have taken steps against bots. Go to CF, you have a setting against bots, and through the firewall you can configure how to reduce invalid traffic to a minimum. In the worst case, you can set that everyone has to verify that they are human before accessing your website.

Then tell, if it is needed (they ask about it) to Adsense representative about steps that you take against invalid traffic

[edited by: dolcevita at 12:49 pm (utc) on Feb 23, 2024]

[not2easy]

If you make changes to remedy the invalid traffic, the problem will be corrected. In your AdSense account interface there are tools to notify you of problems, you will see there when it is corrected if you take steps to correct it.

[daniel1213]

Thank you! I have now sent a message to the support team I corresponded with. We will use CloudFlare (Cloudflare Bot Management). to prevent such situations in the future. I hope they will be understanding. It's really not our fault...

[dolcevita]

Great. I would like to suggest you to add extra line rule inside WAF - Custom Rules

Chalenge Higher than Or Equal 5 And LessThan 100

(cf.threat_score ge 5 and cf.threat_score le 100)

Then set action chose Managed Challenge.

So any IP with suspicion activity in past should be challenged.

[daniel1213]

Thank you!

[Bako]

@daniel1213, Do you have pages that Google can't assess because they are behind a log-in?

[daniel1213]

@Bako, no..

Unfortunately, the problem persists. I contacted the Adsense Support Team. They informed me that I have invalid clicks and suggested some changes.

- Advertising distance from action areas (e.g. Links, buttons)
- Mark ads with - Advertising - (title)
Also, additionally to avoid bots I activated Bot Fight Mode from CloudFlare, I activated CloudFlare on all websites and added the firewall rule (cf.threat_score ge 5 and cf.threat_score le 100)

However, Google told me dryly "Unfortunately, invalid traffic continues to be registered". What is strange is that we have 17 active websites in Google Adsense and those from Google said that all 17 sites register invalid traffic, which is stupid because some sites are new and have a few accesses on day. We have traffic ONLY from Google, no social media traffic or other sources. On the Internet I find more and more such complaints, and in my country there are more than 30 advertisers whom I met on Facebook groups who in the last 14 days encountered such a situation. Could it be from the CPC -> CPM transition, and be a bug?

I did everything I knew.. I don't know how to continue managing the situation. Please help me with an idea. We certainly don't have invalid traffic.

[dolcevita]

A couple of ideas. Analyze traffic in CF. See where more traffic is coming from. Put a javascript or managed challenge check where you get the most visits, or for all traffic except the USA or for the complete traffic including the USA in the next few weeks. See if that helps.

[Seppone]

Google doesn't really care whether this is your fault or not.
You have to get rid of the traffic. block all the countries where the bots might come from. use cloudflare.
What might make sense to replace most of the adsense ads with some other ad network for the next few weeks because google might need a few weeks to reevaluate. Keep them in the loop about your measures.
Forget all the design advice they gave you. that's basically irrelevant.

[CommandDork]

@daniel1213

Does Google Analytics tell you its coming from Poland by chance?

Starting in the middle of last month, I started seeing a boatload of traffic coming out of Poland and then Bulgaria and hitting sites across three separate servers and staying for 1s or less.

Blocking the countries in Cloudflare did NOT end it so they were using some sort of workaround, making it look like it was originating from Poland/Bulgaria. I resorted to looking through my server logs, getting IP addresses that seemed to be "snooping" for weird stuff, and blocking the ASNs through the Cloudflare interface.

Knock on wood, the nonsense traffic the last two days has been cut down considerably from these visits. Hope it sticks.

[daniel1213]

I made the most drastic decision. I have blocked any other source of traffic (by IP) except my country (where we have the highest percentage of traffic) and the USA because Google sends bots from there for Search Engine, Adsense, etc. I sent a new request to Google in the hope that this time, after many measures applied, the unpleasant situation will be resolved.

In the meantime, I discover in the same data interval (from 3 weeks ago until today) a lot of people who have exactly the same problem as me, and who receive exactly the same answer from Google (as if copy/paste). Do I also take into account a BUG resulting from the CPC -> CPM transition? in my country there are dozens of people who have this problem (I found out about them on Facebook groups). Now I found on the Google Adsense Help community a lot of people who are facing this problem.

screenshot [ibb.co]

[shelloux]

I had the same problem and same answers from google. I did some changes and now its fixed ;) But i will try other ad networks with header bidding.

[daniel1213]

@Shelloux Can you tell me what changes you made? Thank you

[shelloux]

Leave all the traffic. Remove all ads (disable auto ads) and leave one ad on the page that gets the least traffic :) 2-4 days should fix it.

[daniel1213]

I don't know what to say.. After I put the banners back, won't there be a penalty again?

[shelloux]

leave one ad on the page that gets the least traffic

[Irka]

hi daniel1213, is it fixed ? Did Shelloux got it right ? Thanks !

[daniel1213]

Unfortunately no. We are trying, but I don't think it is from us. Following the CPC-CPM transition, it seems that hundreds of publishers have been hit.

[adrianTNT]

I have this problem too, since around 11 days ago (~18 march), for 12 000 unique visitors (90% coming from Google organic search) I get paid around $2 /day, used to be $35 - $45, so over 90% earnings drop, this is insane.

I always had my own captcha on site, if users visit 2-3 pages I force them to confirm a captcha, to avoid automated bot impressions.
Since this earnings drop issue I also added cloudflare captcha on all pages containing adsense, I don't think it will help thou.

I had Auto Ads enabled too, I disabled them now.

Google expects us to block invalid clicks but Google has waaaay more data on each IP / user and they are unable to block them themselves. This is absurd.

[daniel1213]

Welcome to the club. Unfortunately, there are many of us in this situation. You can also document the situation here: [support.google.com...]

I'm sorry about your falls. I've been in this since February 23 and I haven't found a solution until today. The support people do not answer.

[adrianTNT]

> I've been in this since February 23

Ah, I was hoping this is more short term and fixable.

Yesterday I asked in their forums, included a graph too, and THEY DELETED MY THREAD ! :( It said "irrelevant content" and similar BS, I just wrote what I wrote above. Very frustrating.

[AndyBeohar]

Please continue blocking the spam bots to ensure the integrity of your website's traffic. Whatever steps you have taken to minimize the issue, document those steps and reach out to Google's support for assistance. From my experience, I would advise you to request a traffic analysis and provide evidence of the spam activity that is affecting your site's performance. Some people tend to take it easy thinking penalties will be lifted once the issue is resolved. Do not take it easy. You should be proactive to make sure such incidents do not happen in the future.

[daniel1213]

I would like this. I blocked absolutely all traffic excluding my country. Firewall with Cloudflare, Bot fight mode and JS CHALLENGE for any traffic from outside my country excluding known bots (Google and others). When I sent an email to Google Adsense support NO ONE ANSWERED ANYMORE. They sent 3 relatively copy/paste emails, nothing personalized, which I later found from dozens of other people on the Adsense Community Forum. Disappointing

[adrianTNT]

Same for me. They gone mad.

[CommandDork]

For what it's worth, I had the best luck finding ASNs through my server logs and Cloudflare and blocking those directly (as opposed to individual IPs, countries). Total country blocks through Cloudflare didn't seem to do anything in my particular case in which trash traffic was being funneled through Poland and then Bulgaria.

That was early March and I haven't seen the problem come back (fingers crossed).

[dolcevita]

I posted my CF setting some time ago, which reduced the invalid traffic to 0.0%-0.1%, so if anyone is interested, here is the link:

[webmasterworld.com...]