Google AdSense leak?

being a small publisher, never knew this.

In a meeting with Adsense employees, by an Adsense employee, I have been told that when fraud is discovered, the account is not cut off and they are not immediately notified. I was told that they wait as long as possible before cutting off the account. Do you deny this?

After attending several meetings with Adsense employees I believe that 90% of Adsense accounts could be considered in violation of at least one policy. Several employees have been told me increase revenue by means which I considered policy violations. Once I saw another Adsense publisher directly confront two employees directly because one said strategy X was a good way increase revenue and another said it was a good way to be banned. They could not resolve this basic issue.

Google is capricious. They are often draconian. They are often evil. They are sometimes beneficent.

You mention that they are no names mention in the accusations. Who is the final arbiter of Adsense policies? To whom should Adsense publishers turn for the resolutions of these serious complaints? Where is the contact information for this person? If Google is not draconian, why has this info not been may public over the past decade?

"People, including you, are willing to accept it as fact that this is an obviously false conspiracy theory because its Google."

aggronn, that's simply not correct. As I said earlier in this discussion, I believe this document is a fake because in my personal experience the terminology is incorrect and the allegations are completely at odds with my direct experience. In addition, multiple people who I trust and have worked with for almost a decade agree that this document is a fake.

This doesn't surprise me at all.

My account was banned for "invalid activity" in the timeframe mentioned. The automated emails said they wouldn't even tell me what I supposedly did wrong. I tried appealing and only got an automated email telling me my appeal was denied. I was never able to talk to anyone or get any actual details on wrongdoing. A quick search and you'll quickly realize this happened to a lot of people.

I had something like $200 sitting in my account, which was obviously forfeited. Before this even happened, I removed ads from my blog (which is where the revenue was earned) because it wasn't performing well enough to justify having ads there anyway.

In the end, I didn't really care so much about my forfeited balance - hell, I even volunteered to forfeit it during the appeal if it was in any way associated with invalid activity among other things. The big issue is that this seems to be a lifetime/universal ban. BEFORE WE EVER RAN ADS, an AdSense account with an unrelated corporate tax ID was also banned for "Invalid Activity". The only reason I can conceivably come up with on the ban is that this was also associated with a Google Apps account that I have.

I'm a longtime Google shareholder and supporter, but it's times like this when you realize you can't trust "Don't Be Evil" any more. Ironically, I've spent way more in Google Apps + AdWords than I ever earned with AdSense.

I am not sure about the claims made on the post but there was something else that caught my eye a while back. I registered for Adsense when starting a side-project. I tried my best to follow all the requirements such as only 3 block of ads per page, no self clicking even if the ad was relevant to you etc. Since it was relatively new, it din't have much traffic. Then it started booming but it wasn't predictable by any manner, one day it would get featured on Reddit and then starts dying down, the next week it will another wave because it got featured in some popular blog, so on. However, despite the traffic being not predictable, the percentage of invalid clicks judged by Google remained the same. i.e. say your account shows up the earnings as $1200 but the check gets issued to you for around $1175, next month if you made $1500, your check will be for $1468. The reason Google claimed for this difference was the final audit that looks for invalid clicks right before a check gets issued. I thought it was crazy that I could easily predict what I would be actually getting instead of what is shown to be earned, moreover my super ability to predict invalid clicks. So I decided to keep a log of the difference for ~ a year, and what do you know, the difference in final audit was almost always the same percentage despite huge variations in traffic. I am happy to post the log but I will be breaking one of the adsense rules of revealing your earnings and thus risk losing my account.

Anyways I am not bothered by it anymore, I just learned to write off the difference as expense and/or consider it as "protection money" that needs to paid. Too bad there aren't any good alternatives. Adsense is by far the best paying ad-network but if it had less shady tactics and better support I would have definitely put it on my recommendation list.