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Nonsense with Google's AdSense?
OmnipotentEntity asks: "I usually come down hard on the side of Google, as I feel that they have a good philosophy and they follow it. However, a forum I regularly visit had a run in with the bad side of Google's AdSense program, and our AdSense account was terminated because of 'invalid click activity.' Some research by a fellow member of the boards turned up other people facing the same problems we ran into. These problems seem localized to sites hosted in Europe. I'm an American, so I have no clue about the European side of AdSense. Have any of our European webmasters ran into the same problems, or are these simply isolated incidents? Is anyone in America experiencing similar difficulties?"
They could just be blunt when booting the smallest publishers, but that would be bad PR; and completely flying in the face of "do no evil" (something Matt Cutts recently reaffirmed).
Saying "We cut small advertisers" = bad PR, "doing evil"
Saying "We are tough on click fraud" = good PR (to advertisers, Wall St, et al); "Don't be evil"
I should point out here that my point was interpretive, ie "Google is doing foo, hence you could say bar". The serious point is that under Google's TOS, clickfraud itself can be widely interpreted.
Ever clicked your own ad? By mistake? Checking it works? Clickfraud. Told family / friends / coworkers you have a website [with fancy Google ads]? Did they click to "help you out"? Clickfraud. Drawn 'undue attention' to your ads (as interpreted by the powers that be at Google) that resulted in a click? Clickfraud. While these don't fall under the definition of I-bought-a-robot-to-generate-1000s-of-clicks, or other egregious violations, Google could call it clickfraud if it so wished.
While these are small potatoes to Google, they are still technically valid reasons to terminate an AdSense account. Maybe Google would use such a technicality as an excuse to terminate an account that was small and a liability to them, maybe they wouldn't. Draw your own conclusions.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
Ditto on my blog. Exact same timing with money too. This is a rampant problem from what I can see. And trying ot get ANY information out of them is impossible. I can't even get telephone calls returned. They NEVER will tell you what invaolid clicks there were, when, etc. So basically, they get free space on yoru site, and get out of paying, and never have to prove why.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
My AdSense account was cancelled with no explaination other than "invalid clicks". I tried and tried to get them to give me details, but the wouldn't. And, they would not reinstate the account either. This was my site (a US site) at www(dot)robotic(dot)com. I had earned $100-200 per month for each of several months before the cancelled the account. Lame... and disappointing as I was planning to use that money for orbiting brain lasers and beowulf clusters (see http://mirror1.spikedhumor.com/1209/SwitchLinux.sw f).