happened to a mate of mine several years ago. he was within week of a payout and they banned him. could only get auto responses. they accused him of clicking his own links. he was really gutted at the time.
Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
51–60 of 168 posts
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#52happened to a mate of mine several years ago. he was within week of a payout and they banned him. could only get auto responses. they accused him of clicking his own links. he was really gutted at the time.
this was his site. i see he no longer has ads. http://www.iojoe.com/
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#53I wrote about this a few years back...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say you don't agree with a particular site that's using adsense. You could (for instance) have you and all your friends click over and over again on the ads on that site, which Google will quickly flag as fraudulent. Any site that attracts a large number of fraudulent clicks is going to get their AdSense account banned. The site owner has no recourse if this happens to them: they agreed to it when they signed up in t…
Say you don't agree with a particular site that's using adsense. You could (for instance) have you and all your friends click over and over again on the ads on that site, which Google will quickly flag as fraudulent. Is it really that easy to put a gun to any random adsense user's head?
Yeah, it's called clickbombing: http://empireflippers.com/clickbombing-and-click-fraud/ (NB, Have no idea whether that's a reputable site, but the analysis in that blogpost is reasonably in depth).
If you're lucky, you catch it, report it to Google & they just take the income away (as it should be). If you're unlucky, Google decides that you're trying to defraud them & their ad clients and kills your entire AdSense account for all the sites you have registered with them. A scorched earth policy being the best possible policy apparently.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#55I think you are better off going with affiliate-based advertising. The payouts are larger and there is no click fraud issue as you are paid for conversions. Shareasale.com or BuySellAds.com are two of the more popular ones.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#56I've not confirmed this at all but interesting it's a lead topic here... http://pastebin.com/qh6Tta3h
That post reads like a complete fake, not least the absurd "don't be evil" nonsense. It reads like fan fiction, or rather hater fiction. Like someone got the ban hammer and is doing what they can to try to get some sort of amnesty. A lot of people engage in click fraud. A lot of people completely break the advertising agreements (the ads that try to solicit accidental clicks, the apps and sites that implore you to cl…
Google needs publishers. They aren't going to cut off their nose for a short-term gain.
For the sake of argument, I'll take a contrary position (I agree that the post smells like it belongs on snopes.com).
They haven't faced a risk of losing publishers yet. There are plenty of them. IF publishers called BS on Google and quit playing Adsense with them, then they may be forced to take care of the publishers they have. But as it stands, they can very well get away with using publishers until it's time to pay up, then dismissing them without explanation.
I faced this kind of stuff from them as an advertiser. One of my apps throws a red flag every time I advertise it- then I have to wait for human intervention to review, and always without explanation of what I need to fix.
This went on for years- I modify an ad, the ad is banned until review. Every time the ad was allowed, after review, because I am not doing anything immoral.
I implored them to give me the benefit of the doubt, after all these years, and spot-check if they need to. Hell, my grocery story lets me check out my own groceries with only occasional 'audits.'
But not Google. Not even after years.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#57A few days before they were just to pay me.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#58I was making $1-3k monthly. I logged in at the end of November (*edit: 2012) to see what my Xmas bonus was going to be. Turns out it would be a big, fat zero. Account suspended/canceled.
I submitted a claim and they said: sorry, no - you're done.
There was zero reason to do it. No ToS violations, no fraudulent clicks. Just $30k less in my bank account for the next year. The second most frustrating part, aside from the loss of revenue, is that they won't tell you why or what caused the cancellation.
Edit 2: RIP AdSense account, ~2006-2012
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#59I use AdMob for a mobile game I made. After successfully using it for years I got a notice that Google had bought the company and that my account would now be an AdSense account. I started earning money there and when I reached the 100usd amount, with no explanation at all I got banned. I filled up contact forms but not reason was given to me. They just said that I was not going to have my money since it was going to…
It's definitely true that accounts above some threshold ($1000?) get extra scrutiny, not just from a adsense perspective but also from an seo perspective. In the long term, Google would be happy to replace the open web with Android or Google+. In the short term if you compete with Google images or other Google properties it is open season.
From what I've read, they do a manual review at certain times right when payout is due. I've seen bank transfers for months on a certain day or within a day or two. But when I had a jump in earnings, it took 3-4 days longer.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#60I was first banned back in 2010 a few days before the payout date. After that I made numerous attempts at getting the account reopened, via their support forms. Then in the fall of 2013, it was reopened, after yet another support "ticket". I didn't start using it again immediately as I had to prepare my sites to at least partially go back to Adsense, after years of using other services. Guess what? A month after I wa…
All it takes is someone who has 5 minutes to lose to writes a shitty bash script that will curl your ads in an infinite loop. That may be the 'illegal activity' reported.
As for the bans occuring a few day before payout, I'd be prone to think that the automated checks for such activity are not run in real time, but at a scheduled time close to a payout. That would explain why so much bans happens before payout (well, excluding malice from google)