Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I am one of a handful of people (that I'm aware of) who have had my account knocked out for invalid clicks and been reinstated a couple of months later.
So, here's a little tip guide primer on what to expect and what to do.
A few things first:
A) You will not receive any check that is currently unprocessed. Consider that payment forfeited (and don't threaten google with a lawsuit to recover it - it will just make things much, much worse).
B) Do confess to them any and all circumstances where you might have screwed up. If you didn't screw up and are genuinely baffled you will need your server logs to locate suspicious activity. I highly recommend getting click tracking software to monitor your ads for exactly this scenario. If you don't have server logs or tracking software, YOU are at fault by default.
C) The account disabling was both automated and then verified manually. Google examines the location of where clicks were coming from. If they see that too many clicks are from the same geographic area as where they send your check (or the ip you log in from) that sets off a red flag. Competitors clicking on your ads is something Google is well aware of and can track as well (they know their geographic area too)
To get your account reinstated:
A) Write google an apology and discuss steps you've taken so the situation won't arise in the future. Don't avoid blame, even if you knew nothing about what your friends were doing when they decided to "help" you by clicking on your ads. The fact is, by revealing information about how you make money to someone else, you are setting yourself up for this situation. I'm not being judgemental, just telling you how Google sees it. In your letter to them, recognize and admit this.
B) Offer to make good on any fraudulent clicks. They won't take you up on it, but they will know that you are genuinely sorry and want to keep their business.
C) Contact someone at google directly. Don't just send off a random email to adsense@google.com. Go to a webmasterworld conference. Meet someone in their company. Use that In when the conference is over. Worst case scenario, BUY an In into the company. Does someone you know have an In there? Offer to pay them to to speak to their In on your behalf. A big adwords spender with a personal ad rep is a good place to begin.
D) Seek out text ad competition immediately. Even if the ads aren't as high-paying as Googles (and they won't be), it will break the sting of losing all of your income until Google does come back around to review your case.
E) Be persistent, but polite. Send a letter (a new one) once a week. Keep reiterating your loyalty to their program and how you are prepared to write letters forever until they will understand you are committed to following their rules if they will reaccept you.
Now for the bad news....
None of this will probably help. To be reviewed for readmission, your site must be large enough that the revenue is worth a potentially risky business move.
If they don't answer your letters anymore and all hope is lost, you are now left with basically one recourse assuming you really want to be in their program: Change your domain name, bank account, IP address, ISP and site design. Wait two months, then take on a partner you trust. Reapply for the program under this new partner's name and address, (now especially possible given Google's automatic deposit program). Learn from your mistakes and never do anything that can potentially result in your ads being clicked on fraudulently again. So, really, get a partner you can trust will not click as well.
To anyone else who hasn't been kicked out yet and never wants to be:
A) Shut up about how you make money when talking to friends and family. Let them privately think you run a bestiality porn site or something. It's still better than them clicking on your ads :)
B) Disable ads for your own ip and local geographic region, if you have access to that data and it won't hurt your business. Ditto with your competition's ip address. If you don't know it, write him an email pretending to be a customer and look at his return headers.
C) Get click-monitoring software and check it daily. Be vigilant in notifying Google about what YOU think is fraud, even if they don't. Your notifications to them will come in especially handy should your account ever be flagged by them. You'll be remembered as honest.
D) Think of Google for the long term, not the short term. So you're having a bad month and think clicking on an ad you might be interested in anyway doesn't hurt anyone? You're wrong. This month might be bad. Next month will be good. Google revenue is about long term averages. Is a few cents click worth the loss of thousands of dollars in the long term? Definitely not.
Take it from me, I've been there, been put out on the street, and eventually been reaccepted (after a lot of hard work). It can and does happen to any of us. Just make sure the odds of it happening to you are as slim as possible.
[edited by: asp4bunnies at 8:04 pm (utc) on Mar. 24, 2005]
You get kicked out for on page issues, likea) no content
b) made for adsense website
c) encouraging users to click or other deceptive tricks
I think the above has a lot more to do with it than people realize. I've seen some sites/accounts that have been kicked out and I wouldn't want my ads displaying if I was an AdWords advertiser. Of course there are many other reasons and I'm sure actual click fraud plays a role, but being booted with an "invalid clicks" email doesn't mean click fraud.
1) Frame your pages that have google adsense. The top frame is 100% , the bottom is 0% (hidden).
2) Use Javascript to detect any clicking in the adsense area, then pass the info to the bottom frame, which is a PHP (or cgi or asp page) which either writes the users' ip address to a database, or captures it in some other way.
3) Then you can run an easy script on this captured IP data to single out competitor spam-clicking, and add this batch of IP addresses to your exclude list in AdSense on a daily basis.
Tadaaa, as long as once per day is frequent enough, and so long as you have a database w/ some scripting language on your server, this should work. What does everyone think about this idea?
sounds like a good idea, but I shudder at the thought of using frames...
perhaps you could put an iframe on the page somewheres and set the visibility to none (if you can do that to an iframe) or make it extremely tiny.
That way your whole site is not in a frame.
better yet, output the iframe via javascript so the search engines don't even look at it
Wait two months, then take on a partner you trust. Reapply for the program under this new partner's name and address
I'd suggest refraining from suggesting things like this, especially if you didn't do it.
In the US, unless you do this with the proper legal paperwork, such a "relationship" could have serious tax and legal consequences. It is no joke to face charges of money laundering and/or tax evasion simply because you made an informal agreement with a friend and other factors came into play.
Because of proxies, the use of click-tracking scripts, etc., is (largely) a waste of time.
It is too bad that somebody doesnt create for us a collection of all sorts of banned sites, so that we could get a clearer picture. As it is, for us, there is simply no way of knowing exactly where the "frauds"/errors/etc. occurs. That would be the best thing in clearing up unecessary fears as well.
We just got the dreaded 'deactivated for invalid clicks' email from Google.
1.) We asked Google to go over our site/setup when we first got started a couple months back to see if there were issues that might concern them and got a clean bill of health
2.) We have NEVER made any kind of post/reference on our site encouraging/requesting members to click Google banners
3.) We DO have OTHER banners, to online game voting sites, that we DO request members click...and are incentivized within the game....which we told Google about when signing up...and still got the OK.
In other words, I'm not sure what else we could do from our end to have prevented what Google perceives as 'invalid clicks'...and, of course, they refuse to give further information on how they determined that. We're just supposed to take their word that we screwed up, eat the hundreds of dollars we were expecting in payment, and move on.
It bothers me when I see threads (in these forums and elsewhere) assuming that accounts deactivated by Google 'deserved what they got', 'are thieves', etc when that is quite obviously not always a fair assessment. We did all we thought we needed to short of disabling ads on our own IPs and telling members NOT to click ads just to help us out...yet here we are, deactivated.
Are there other programs out there? Certainly. But none carry as much weight as Google, in my opinion, none present the variety of ads Google does, and I'm not sure any even pay as well.
My problem is...if we don't know what we did to get deactivated, exactly how can we prevent it from happening again? It's hard enough to 'survive' as a free site these days without the constant worry that some well meaning member doesn't take it upon themselves to click 100 ads one day and get us suspended...or I don't accidently click a banner I'm truly interested in once in awhile....or whatEVER it is we did that ticked Google off.
Any help anyone has to offer would be appreciated.
Google knew of our incentivizing those voting banners and said we were fine...
But given we rely on those voting sites to keep getting new members, I don't wanna shut them off...or 'deincentivize' them unless it'd help get us reinstated.
Hmmm...
* Learn in a paranoid way to NEVER click ads on your site (I've posted elsewhere that about accidentally clicking while testing pages on my site, and was logged into Google Adsense at the same time generating the ad code... it was a zero-cent click that I had to wait 2 days to see so I could relax). Your paranoia should carry over to telling your friends and family to NEVER click ads. It's kinda like getting prosecuted for stealing a pen from an employer... a $.50 item costing the potential for thousands of $$. I agree with the "don't tell" policy about AdSense earnings - tell people you have many advertisers (and with Adsense you in effect DO have many many advertisers), and you have affiliate links, and non-incentivized earning streams, and web-service-enabled meta-models to architect your data collection, etc... and keep going until their eyes glaze over. And tell people you don't make a lot online through ads, and that you're excited about publishing a book, or whatever.
* Anyone that has an incentive-to-click policy for some of the pages and also has regular ads (incl. Adsense) on the same pages - or other pages on the same site - is playing with fire. It's still dangerous, even if you are pre-approved (ever see a pre-approved mortgage get cancelled? Yes.) If you can, build another site for non-incentive type of pages and give it a different look-and-feel, before you play with that fire.
* Google, Yahoo, etc. are running a business, and the advertisers pay the bills. If one of the people paying my bills complained about the content or incentives on a site, I'd kick them out. If I didn't, the money-paying people would not spend with me, and my competition would get 200% improvement over me (i.e. - in economics, a dollar not spent with you, and spent on your competition, is negative 100% for you and plus 100% for your competition.)
* Final (ominous) note: If someone figured out how to get someone booted from an ad program, would they tell anyone? If you think the TV news of what people have done - and get caught for - is any indication... "someone" is doing all of this real-world and computer crime - not robots, cats, dogs, or ghosts - and so someone could be doing it to you while being nice. You can assess the risk that one of your friends, your relatives, and (especially) your colleagues, competition, and neighbor's kids will do bad things when no one is looking. So, the less they know about your vulnerabilities, the better. I could be wrong, but I'm not - the stories in the news tells me that human nature is both day, and night, and devious people won't tell you what they are doing to you.
being booted with an "invalid clicks" email doesn't mean click fraud
I agree. I think that sometimes "invalid clicks" is just Google's way of saying "lousy traffic"
3.) We DO have OTHER banners, to online game voting sites, that we DO request members click...and are incentivized within the game....which we told Google about when signing up...and still got the OK.
You may have had a raw deal here. By asking google to look at your site, and pointing out what you felt might have been a problem you did exactly the right thing. I wonder if anyone actually read your email, or even visited the site.
It states quite clearly in the TOS that:-
Site may not include:
<snip>
Gambling or casino-related content
<snip>
Incentives (monetary or point-based)to users to click on links or ads while visiting a site containing Ads
I assume your site hasn't changed much since you applied for adsense, so it's fairly clear that if they had taken any time to look at the site and read your concerns the above points would have been obvious, could have been discussed and could have been remedied.
Have they given you any clues at to why you got booted?
- install one of script for monitoring clicks on your adsense
- look into script every couple days or better every day to see impression, clicks etc...
- by any higher impression from one ip or by several clics on adsense from one ip, ban ip from your site and take contact with google about it.
Guys i think that you must have contact with google by every suspicious clicks/inmpression activity on your site.
And you must install good script for monitoring.
I think that AsRep so far best script.I'm not gonna to post url because it is against this board policy but you cna easily find via google.
And i did not buy script because it is expensive but free version give me enough informations to investigate anything.
what is to stop a competitor from putting your adsense code on a page that violates adsense TOS (such as asking to click, or porn page or whatever), to try to get you banned?
I assume they make sure the clicks are coming from the right URL.
