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Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

news.ycombinator.com

71–80 of 168 posts

Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

#71
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that completely legal for them to do? I know nothing about ad business, but I would expect that if you provided service (shown ads) they should not be able to withhold your money without explanation. How is that different from refusing to pay for, say, rented car?

There are solid differences between renting cars and serving ads. In the end, it's would be a civil legal matter and probably not worth anybody's time for $100 coupled with the high chance of losing considering the terms of service agreed to.

In my state (Missouri) Small Claims Court seems to work fairly well for these types of things. It does take a lot of time, so it probably isn't "worth" it in a purely monetary sense, but it is worth it to me in an ethical sense. It is fraud, pure and simple.

Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going by http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html HN was seeing 120k uniques as of 2011. This post has been up for an hour, and attracted 105 poll respondents. (120k / 24) is 5000 users, 105 respondents represents about 2% of that. So either 2% of all HN readers have had their AdSense account banned, or the poll results are a bit noisy :) (Obviously this is extremely rough math, but allowing for a huge error margin, 0.5%…

HN was seeing 120k uniques as of 2011. This post has been up for an hour, and attracted 105 poll respondents. (120k / 24) is 5000 users, 105 respondents represents about 2% of that. Actually, HN has grown exponentially since 2011. You'll have to extrapolate this chart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253773 Also, the traffic fluctuates depending on which part of the day you measure. There are comparatively few…

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Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

#73
post #70

The thought of getting banned is one of my worst fears. The other fear is a change in algorithms that severely affects search engine referring traffic. It's a weird feeling to be able and have your business destroyed overnight due to circumstances completely out of your control and without any recourse. tl;dr: For what Google giveth, it may taketh away.

As someone who formerly worked for a company who built Facebook apps...this is precisely how we felt.

Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

#74
I got banned because someone posted some insults/porn words in a title. There was no pictures/videos... it was just words.

They sent me the link where the words were and gave me something like 4 days (or was it more? It was a pretty scary amount of time anyway).

I went to that url and didn't find anything, so I sent them a mail asking for more info. Never had a reply. Got banned.

I discovered later that it was in the english version of my website and I didn't think about changing the language to check the content there.

Can't remember how much money I lost, wasn't a huge amount.

ps: I just got a domain banned, my other domain were still bringing me money without any problem.

Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

#75
I had AdSense on my blog for a couple months, and then was banned just before I earned $100 and qualified for my first payout.

Now, when I see Google ads, I click on a couple just to mess up their statistics. I really should write a browser extension that does it automatically.

Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

#76
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lengthy previous discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976 Including Matt Cutts' response to the text in the pastebin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7669071

Thanks for the links. I was uncertain the context for this HN post. Also, Matt's reply is really helpful.

Matt's reply (or denial) is useless to this conversation. I have a great deal of respect for Matt and his contributions to the SEO community but he's quite possibly the last person I would expect to confirm, or even give credence to a claim like this given his connection to Google.

Asking the ad department if they've been stealing money from thousands of publishers over the last several years? Of course they're going to deny, no matter the truth as confirming would essentially be an admission a very serious crime.

Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

#77
I got my Adsense banned, but I was lucky to get it appealed after a second try...I ranted on my blog post about how YouTube then started sending copyright content notifications on my videos which retroactively removed my finalized earnings (keyword: finalized), this was like 4 months AFTER my Adsense was reinstated. That happened within 4 days of the payout cycle.

[1] https://medium.com/p/6caf19d2c542

Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

#79
It's common knowledge among SEOs that AdSense tends to be disabled a few days before the supposed payout. I haven't lost any big sum - only $2000 but I know one person that lost $40,000. It was all legitimate traffic coming straight from Google themselves, no click fraud no bought traffic etc.

PS: I was using AdSense from 2008 to 2013 - over 5 years so it's not like only new users got banned.

Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?

#80
post #10

I am one of the many victims of an adsense ban. One of my sites was picked on, and I was blanket banned. When I appealed using their form I got an automated response saying that they had considered my request and it will not change (within 30s of submitting the form). I've been trying to get in touch with someone at Google for almost a year now to discuss the issue and find out why I was banned. Not only did it knock…

What do you mean by "picked on?"

Poor turn of phrase. I meant that one site was given as the reason for the ban. No warning. Ban email not highlighting the policies that were specifically violated and only automated appeal rejections.
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