google adsense

You reported invalid clicks on your site? How did you know you had invalid clicks?

Did they give you a specific reason? I find it alarming that they can use the invalid clicks excuse to drop any account, and not provide a specific reason why.

Originally Posted by kall

Within 3 days of me reporting the invalid clicks on my account, they shut it down. Not quite the drop of a hat, but pretty darned quick nonetheless.

Originally Posted by TundraSoul

Could someone stop by my site, and check it for adsense compliance? Look in the forum, and gallery to see if I might have any problems. I was very careful setting adsense up, following all the rules, but after reading this, I guess you never know. I have a high traffic website with potential to bring in a lot of revenue, and I don't want to accidentally do anything wrong.

Contact Google for compliance via your adsense page. They will check it out and tell you if there are any problems.

Originally Posted by ConqSoft

You reported invalid clicks on your site? How did you know you had invalid clicks?

I got back from visiting Dad in the hospital (from monday through to thursday) to see that I had several thousand clicks for the Tuesday.

Given that my previous clicks were nowhere near this, I guessed they were invalid.

@TundraSoul: No other reason than 'invalid clicks were detected. As you know...blah blah blah...protect advertisers blah blah blah...goodbye.'

So what's to prevent someone from going onto your site and clicking the banners a few thousand times? The idea being to get the site owner booted out of adsense, which can hurt their business. Apparently there's little or no obvious investigation on Google's part, and they can just use that broad excuse to dump anyone.

Originally Posted by kall

@TundraSoul: No other reason than 'invalid clicks were detected. As you know...blah blah blah...protect advertisers blah blah blah...goodbye.'

Well obviously, nothing at all.

I suspect that is exactly what happened. Here's a really vague, so as to protect the innocent parties, story:

I can't confirm what date the clicks occured, but I believe that it had something to do with my (at the time, recently finished-) Moderator status on a site, and another site that was having 'issues' with that site...and some things I said on another site. All of this annoyed someone to the extent that they did this to me.

Click fraud is very big business these days, largely because it's often impossible to pin down.

Google has no way of truly determining if fraudulent clicks are your fault, or not. Through their analysis/guesstimation, they try to compare the viability against the liability of a further advertising relationship with your site.

By this method, many innocent websites get "thrown to the wolves", but, overall, they protect the reputation of their service. It's not designed to be fair, it's designed to maintain long-term revenue.


From WMW: What do do when you're kicked out of AdSense

From ThreadWatch: List of AdSense alternatives


Or, search Google for "adsense alternatives". More will come to the surface, as AdSense is obviously a successful method.

This is comparable to the early days of PPC advertising on GoTo.com (now Overture). Fraud was easy, and widespread; if you got "kicked out", it would've seemed like the end of the world. Now, there are a million places to do PPC. The next breed of AdSense-type publishers seem to be targeting Google AdSense refugees.

You are lucky you didn't lose much. About a 5 months ago, they closed our account on 18th of a month for the same reason. They never sent us the check for the prior month either, so we lost 30+18 days worth of advertising which was total of $3210+.

I contacted them and asked them what was considered invalid clicks and isn't their system smart enough to stop abusers? I also mentioned if we ever wanted to cheat and generate invalid clicks, we would have done it from the day we started which goes back to the beta adsense.

Never got anything out of them and lost a lot of business as a result.