Google AdSense Account has Been Disabled

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Some visitors may have noticed that the Google avertisements on this website have disappeared. This is due to Google deciding to disable my account because they detected "invalid clicks." Last month I noticed an unusual spike in AdSense earnings and expected them to drop again. Well, the earnings didn't drop at all. It looks as if these earnings were due to people deliberately clicking on advertisements that they have no interest in. Whilst I did suspect that this was happening (all the clicks were on the top banner, and there were too many of them), I am personally not responsible for them; nor did I know of any way to counter this. Naturally, the Google Adsense "invalid click" detection algorithms picked this up, and my account was promptly disabled without warning. I did appeal, citing that I am not responsible for these clicks, but I received a standard email reply stating that the account would not be reinstated.

Basically, I have been punished for something that I did not do. What bothers me is that anyone with a low traffic site could have their AdSense account disabled because of actions of others. Bots designed to click on ads in order to waste comptitors money, or even just people deliberately clicking could have an account disabled. In fact, this has happened to thousands of websites already, (e.g., see here and here).

In the end, Google does have to work in order to prevent fraud. However, it is clear that many people (like me) who have been adhering to their terms of service, are being kicked out. Whilst the additional clicks that this site received probably were invalid, I most certainly was not involved. My guess is that it is cheaper to just kick out and ignore low traffic sites rather than to work with them to solve the problems. For example, if they can detect patterns of invalid clicks, surely filtering out those clicks should be possible? Confiscating as yet unpaid earnings and treating the publisher as a criminal for the actions of others just makes Google look bad. Such rough treatment of website publishers will only serve their competitors such as Yahoo well.

The Bright Side

This incident has motivated me to redesign this site a little while I delete all the AdSense code (I will post more about the changes later). AdSense never really brought more than a few dollars a month (none of which I will ever get); I signed up for AdSense as an experiment, with the idea that it would cover any increase in server costs if the traffic did increase to a level that my current hosting plan could not cope with. With AdSense gone, I now have more motivation to look for other ways to subsidise the hosting costs.

Comments (2) | 11 March 2009