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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?"
Well a site I ran to host a guild forum got it canceled just as I was reaching my first $100 and the same happened to the guy who writes this funny blog I read (just as he was reaching his first $100 as well): http://bannable-offenses.blogspot.com/ (post about it: http://bannable-offenses.blogspot.com/2006/04/seri ous-note.html)
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
I can't comment on the site in question, but in general AdSense and web forums are not always a good match. Forums often get a fairly small number of highly active viewers, which give rise to one of two phenomena: a) they don't click on the ads much (low clickthru rate), and when they do it sticks out statistically like a sore thumb, leading to possible (mis)interpretation regarding click fraud; or b) the more enthusiastic users take it upon themselves to click regularly on ads to support their forum, which will also raise a few red flags.
Forums can sometimes do well with AdSense if they have a high ratio of "read only" users and take steps such as not showing ads to logged in users.
The better you are treated. Seems obvious, but there are a quite a few small publishers that don't make enough for Google to go to any trouble over. Fraudulent click activity? If the advertisers are getting angry, its easier just to say "We have banned the site in question." than to actually find and deal with the source of the problem. They need to be seen to strike a balance - and it's much easier to be harsh to someone that is only bringing your company $100 / week than someone who brings in $100k / week.
A touch cynical? Perhaps, but consider that: they have recently made some Big Changes(TM) to they way they crawl (aka Big Daddy(TM)); they have admitted a storage problem; and their stock has slipped recently. What better message to send to publishers that "We are tough on fraudulent clicks" to restore confidence.
I'm not bashing them. Seriously. Business is business. They run their advertising program, they determine the TOS and how they are applied. It's not like alternatives aren't avaliable (one recently launched at the Center of attention...). Anyway, it isn't all bad news. There is a publisher who netted over $1M from AdSense in three short months. Yes, you heard me, net. And this publisher isn't a corp, business or big team. Just one guy with a whole lotta pageviews. I bet he's treated very well by the folks at the 'plex...
So while ther may indeed be a problem/conspiracy/whatever, do consider that 1) they may actually be engaging in click fraud (eg "drawing undue attention to advertisements") or 2) they may be more of a liability than they are worth.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
I saw some discussion about this over on Metafilter. One of the comments in this thread about Pinknews being dropped from AdSense says that it may be a side effect of Google's right hand not knowing what the left one is doing.
The commenter mentioned that AdSense had been placing a lot of high-CPC ads on his site, and shortly thereafter, he was banned. He suspects that Google's marketing department decided to push some big-revenue ads out there, and then the Fraud department, running their usual heuristics, noted spikes in big-revenue clicks. So they disabled many perfectly legitimate webmasters for something that Google itself caused. You could argue that this is fraud on Google's part, since these webmasters are deprived of legitimately-earned revenue. Worse, since they're banned for life from the program, in many cases their small businesses will be destroyed. And there is no appeal and no recourse.
In fact, there is absolutely no way to talk to Google about any of this, so problems like this only get worse. I suspect it may take lawsuits to get them to change their ways.
Google's mantra needs to add: "Do as little accidental evil as possible, and fix it when we do." But I don't see that happening soon.
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
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).
A friend at work mistyped gmail.com as gamil.com which is an actual site... with google ads... which suggest typing lessons.
I know someone who put adsense on their site and then clicked hundreds of ads to "Find competing websites" so they could block them. They were terminated, but they pleaded their case and swore they wouldn't do it again. After about a month Google let them back in. I was surprised.
You can disagree with Google and not be a troll. Get over it.
Although you personally were not to blame, your case was indeed one of deliberate fraud and Google was smart enough to figure it out. In this sense, Google is acting responsibly. In borderline cases where they can not be completely sure, they play it safe. They may not trust a site and are unwilling to do business with it again themselves, but they don't publically malign it. In cases where they know for a fact that real deliberate fraud occured, it is responsible of them to warn others.