How to Get Banned from AdSense

Jim Hutchinson

My brother called this morning in total disbelief. He had acquired 200,000 AdSense ready pages and spent weeks getting them all online.

A "good friend" of his decided to help my brother by surfing through many of those pages. After he was surfing a while, he called my brother to boast about what a good friend he was for helping to increase the AdSense earnings. My brother told him not to do that because it could cause trouble. However, his friend did not listen and continued to surf and click ads.

Surfing is not bad unless you click on a bunch of the AdSense ads like his friend did. At some point, the friend got a pop-up warning stating that the Google Terms had been violated and the account is under investigation.

Anyone who uses AdSense knows that you are not allowed to click the ads on your own pages. But did you also know that clicking too many ads on a site would get you banned too?

Another way to get banned is by setting up AdSense ads on a page you advertise through traffic exchanges. I did that a few weeks ago and just one day after having the page up, I received a violation warning from Google. I immediately took AdSense off that page and wrote back to Google telling them it had been fixed. they thanked me for abiding by their rules.

AdSense can be good to use, but you must be careful on how it is implemented. Although you cannot stop people from surfing and clicking on all the ads, what would be alternative measures to help prevent abuse?

Jim Hutchinson

Rosalind Gardner

Hey Jim,

That's frightening. Did your brother lose his Google Adsense account?

Ros

Jim Hutchinson · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 7:43 pm Post subject:

Hi Ros

I am checking with my brother and will post an update when I know more. Thanks for asking!

Jim Hutchinson

Jim Hutchinson · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 2:41 am Post subject: **Google Account Shut Off**

Google has not responded to my brother's appeal yet so his account is still shut off and he is still waiting for a reply to explain that the excessive clicks were not his fault.

Should Google not agree to restore his account, it would be quite a chore to switch to Yahoo or another PPC, but it would be such a waste not too. I do not know where he obtained those 200,000 pages but I do know that it took him a month to set them all up.

Someone on another forum pointed me to a program that can limit the number of page views and clicks on AdSense ads though. This may be useful to others that use AdSense, especially on larger sites such as articles.

The software is called AdSense Click Lock. This is not an affiliate link:
http://www.tysdomains.com/gold/adsenseclicklock

I bought it and will be trying it out. It uses a MySQL database to store the visitor and click info. Hope that helps someone.

Jim

Katherine Huether · Joined: 24 Apr 2007 Posts: 21

I have an adsense account on some of my old blogs and I remember I clicked on my own links a few times - mainly just to see if it worked. I got so worried that I emailed their tech support and told them. They said that even in that situation, it is forbidden!

Jim Hutchinson · Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 8:43 pm Post subject: **BANNED!!**

This is the reply from Google on my brother's appeal. They really take clicks seriously.

Katherine Huether · Joined: 24 Apr 2007 Posts: 21

I am starting a new site and I don't think I am going to put Adsense on it. It just seems as if there are better ways to go about making some extra cash. My family and friends often visit my sites, and I would be too worried that I would end up banned from it. I've had my Adsense account for over a year and have not even made my first $100 yet so it doesn't seem worth it. Then again, those sites did not get a lot of traffic because I was on blogger.

Jim Hutchinson · Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 11:52 am Post subject: **Instead of AdSense...**

Google AdSense ads have their place online and think the best way to generate income from them is through arbitrage: Use an AdWords account to bid lower on keywords than they pay for clicks on a page with the same keywords.

I agree with you Katherine, on having better ways to make money from ads. For instance, I used to have AdSense on my blog posts until I realized that instead of making a few pennies on the rare occasion that someone would click one of those ads, I would rather make more when someone purchased an actual product like the Super Affiliate Handbook (SAH).

What I discovered through my traffic logs is that people come to my blogs for articles and information about services, visit a few other pages within my site or blog, with such a rare click on the ads that like you, I make very little on the AdSense ads.

So I created a small table with ads that look similar to the AdSense layout and use that in my blog posts instead. I put that ad block just before the "Read more..." link so it is always visible.

I try to match the ads to the article as closely as possible. Being an affiliate for enough related products I usually find something that fits. If not, then I opt for SAH and my primary services.

You can go to the Search link at the top of this forum and search all topics for the single word, AdSense. There are many other discussions on it to help you and others understand how to use the ads.

Keep something else in mind. Look around this forum and you will see that 99% of the links either link within the forum, or to the SAH site. The only ones I see leading outside the site are the AdSense ads. The idea is that once you have your audience, keep them either within your site or network of sites.

Hope that helps.

Jim Hutchinson

catherinel · Joined: 13 May 2007 Posts: 62

That is scary, because it means that a competitor could click on your Adsense ads and get you banned.

This worried me a lot. Early last year I was having problems with competitors, who had somehow managed to hack a couple of my sites and sabotage them. I was also getting a ridiculously high click through rate on adsense on a couple of my sites.

I emailed adsense and told them I was concerned that the high click through rate was down to competitors trying to get me banned. They assured me that they had the technology to monitor and deal with those situations. So I didn't get any warnings, and my account wasn't banned.

If they have changed their policy then this is frightening. I am wondering if your brothers friend was using your brothers computer, or maybe he lived near him. Perhaps Google would be suspicious about clicks from computers in the same IP range? I know the competitors that were clicking my site live in a different country to me.

Has anyone else had similar problems with Adsense?

Roy Carter · Joined: 10 Aug 2007 Posts: 24 Location: Cyprus

A very worrying scenario and I must admit that the thought that Catherine mentioned did ocurr to me as well.

If competitors could just click away on your Adsense ads on your site and get you banned, the system would surely soon fall apart?

It's comforting to know that Google are confident that they are on top of the problem, but I think that Catherine did exactly the right thing.

If you think that your Adsense ads are suddenly and inexplicably getting far too many clicks to be true, then alerting Google to this fact would seem the way to go.

Roy