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Comment by deanclatworthy | Hacker News Reader

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 out my revenue for that site but all my other sites now cannot benefit from Adsense revenue.

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What do you mean by "picked on?"

I don't know exactly what he is talking about but I can speak to my experience:

Once you receive a warning notice, your site enters the scopes of the policy enforcement team. When you make changes to your AdSense code, possibly other relevant code on your site, they send human reviewers to reevaluate your site.

I believe this because I received a warning for encouraging unintentional clicks.

I received this warning because in-content ad units had links blended to site link colors.

Additionally, I was aligning ad units with images.

After making these changes, the issue was resolved.

They never ceased serving ads, which was nice.

This occurred around the 7-8k monthly mark for those wondering.

After making these changes my revenue dropped about 1/4. This was disappointing.

A few weeks later I tried to revert to the in-content ad units with the blended link colors. I tried to use a light gray background color, literally one shade away from white, to distinguish the ad unit from content.

Within 30 minutes of making these changes, I received two new warnings,

one for encouraging unintentional clicks, and another for having content over ads.

This is because I had a hover drop down menu for navigation that dropped over ads in some parts.

I made the changes and ad serving has continued.

I make less now, but as someone who depends on AdSense income to provide for my family, I am happy to continue serving ads in the first place.

The reason there is no competition is because everybody else is scared shitless to open themselves up to publishers.

Click fraud is a thriving and sophisticated business, and nobody else (major) has had the chops to explore that black box.

I found my experience with AdSense enforcement to be fair, but the process is frightening.

I am excited that Facebook is experimenting with their ad network.

Competition is good for everybody.

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 the first place - Google can drop them for whatever reason they feel like at any time.

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.

so far nobody has listed how they actually got in contact with google. Is there a certain email? method?

Only recourse that I have seen work is public shaming on a forum that someone high enough in Google notices (like mcutts).

Yeah, and guess what? You can "purchase" clicks and traffic in order to achieve this.

If you get on the tor network, you should be able to find a few places where you can pay (for example) a $100 for 30,000 views/clicks from a random country in the world to hit a site.

I'd imagine 30,000 false adsense clicks would do it.

Yes, I had it happen to me about 5-6 years ago. Fortunately I had some evidence at the time, and after weeks of trying, I got my account reinstated. But it is very easy to do and probably happens more often than people realize.

I have lost respect for Google in the sense that they are incapable of responding to people in a timely fashion on bans that could be potentially wrongful.

Yes.

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.

I am in the exact same boat as you.

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