Our beef here is not even necessarily with the false positive. The main problems here are that
a) We have never been accused of wrongdoing by Google. This makes it very hard to defend ourselves.
b) That it takes making a lot of noise in a very public manner to get any sort of response.
and c) That we had a working relationship with Google and a track record of working with our account manager to improve our ad placements, etc.
If there was a legitimate concern with our "traffic quality" why didn't someone at Google give me a call to talk about it and see what we could do to fix whatever issues there apparently were?
I sell a fairly complicated (120k+ lines of code) .NET application (http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper) that manages the creation and hosting of websites by using the popular Apache, PHP, MySQL stack, and other apps. And I also provide support for it and the mentioned tech, the cost of which is included in the price of my software. And I've been doing this is some way or fashion since 2003.
For that, I was told, my site "had been flagged for unacceptable business practices", that is, as far as I could de-crypt the support conversation... Selling free items. A big WTF moment for me.
It's unlikely you can help me, but you can help others by white-listing the adwords/adsense customer service representatives’ email domains or IP blocks in Gmail... As both emails I received from them I found in my Gmail’s spam folder (pure luck on my part)!
I can’t think of how many people must get the silent treatment from Google due to this blunder.
It's a nice gesture, but... this could have been handled way before and from the messages in this thread it seems like a very common occurrence. As somebody who wanted to use your services in the future that thread totally changed my vision of Adsense and I am exploring other companies for ads.
We need you guys at Adsense to fix the problem after it happens, of course, but also beforehand because holding money for too long can kill a business.
Thanks