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Comment by bks | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an AdSense vs. Adwords issue. What the forum users were doing was defrauding Adwords advertisers in an attempt to bolster your AdSense account.

Essentially committing fraud. The issue in this post is his AdWords account was banned because of x,y,z reason but not because of to many clicks. They probably saw the $100 credit beding used for affiliate direct linking and flagged the account.

Just as an aside I have 13GB on dropbox now and got the additional storage by using the technique outlined in the article. My biggest difference was that the account was seasoned and I was spending my own money, not google coupon money.

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Thanks for clarifying :) I was actually under the impression that AdSence was AdWords renamed. My issue happened in 2008 after all, I'm still suspended today.

Anyway, I agree that these users were committing fraud, but why ban me? I didn't condone (or even know) what they were doing until after the fact. The correct thing for AdSence to do here is to identify the offending IP addresses, cancel the credit accumulated by said IPs, and let me continue supporting the program on my site.

You're right. Weaponizing this could be a way to kick vendors off adsense (which is basically what your fans did by accident)

> Anyway, I agree that these users were committing fraud, but why ban me?

Because, explicitly or implicitly, something you were doing was encouraging people to defraud advertisers through your website. The way to stop this is to eliminate the cause (the person/site encouraging the fraud) not the symptom (today's batch of site visitors). Multiple people don't start engaging in multi-day click fraud behavior randomly -- something sets it off, something as innocuous as a forum post encouraging it or text near the ad that says "this project supported by ad clicks" -- but there has to be a catalyst, and that's the thing they're putting an end to by suspending an account.

> Because, explicitly or implicitly, something you were doing was encouraging people to defraud advertisers through your website.

That's a pretty bad thing to say about someone without any proof whatsoever. If users decide to 'help' you that does not automatically mean that you 'explicitly or implicitly' encouraged them to do so. People will do the strangest things without any prompting.

Technically this exposes a weakness in Google's program, after all any competitor could do this to you resulting in the banning of your account.

$10 is not enough money for them to care so they just ban you and move on. It's bullshit, IMO, but unless you are making them much more, they will not care.

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