Adsense account unfairly disabled / deleted!

j8jweb · Sep 17, 2004

I had the most bizarre thing happen to me today. I received an email from Google which informed me they were disabling my Adsense account! I have absolutely no idea why they would do this. The suggestion of illegitimate clicks in the email is completely false from my perspective.

Their email follows:

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on the ads on your web pages. We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense account. Please understand that this step was taken in an effort to protect the interest of the AdWords advertisers.

A publisher's site may not have invalid clicks on any ad(s), including but not limited to clicks generated by a publisher on his own web pages, clicks
generated through the use of robots, automated clicking tools, or any other
deceptive software.

Practices such as these are in violation of the Google AdSense Terms and Conditions and programme polices, which can be viewed at:

https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms?hl=en_GB
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_GB

Sincerely,
The Google Team

Has anyone else had this happen before? I questioned Google about it, and this simply resulted in "we cannot reveal specifics" and "rest assured your account did indeed receive invalid clicks" etc.

Bitterly frustrating, and I feel powerless. Obviously if this is some sort of malicious action from another webmaster against my site I will need to pursue it legally. And what happens to the revenue that was in my account under these circumstances?

iBizStart · Sep 17, 2004

I have had this happen before. Your revenue is gone, and you can't get it back and you can't even open up a new account.

j8jweb · Sep 17, 2004

Great. What a total abuse of power this is.

Steen · Sep 18, 2004

How do you know that this was a malicious attempt by another (competing?) webmaster?

It's G's program, you agreed to the TOS, I don't see why they can't terminate anyone for no reason at all.

j8jweb · Sep 18, 2004

True, but wait until this happens to you, with several hundred (or even several thousand) dollars sitting in your disabled Adsense account, with no reasonable explanation from Google whatsoever, other than "we felt like it" or similar. It's pretty crap to say the least.

seeker · Sep 18, 2004

wow!

this is serious stuff!!!

Alexander · Sep 18, 2004

I read an article a while back. It was about a huge forum which just added the Google Adsense ads. They received $500 in revenue the first day, and their account was terminated. And I know that they didn't cheat.

seeker · Sep 18, 2004

time to seek legal alternatives????

Assuming everything is legit (which I am not doubting), take a legal road and report here.
DNF works miracles...

j8jweb · Sep 18, 2004

I have contacted their legal dept today...

Seeker, are you suggesting they may be swayed by my offering them $DNF ?

seeker · Sep 18, 2004

j8jweb said:
I have contacted their legal dept today...

Seeker, are you suggesting they may be swayed by my offering them $DNF ?

naaahhhh.
They want pure $ in a Swish account!

I wish you the best of luck as I am sure If this ever happened to any of our peers here at DNF, we would all stick together and ask for justice.

iBizStart · Sep 18, 2004

This sucks for all of us? We finally get a good domain name and start earning revenue on adsense and they just cancel our account. What are our alternatives? THere are none? We can't park the domains because we are using websites/content to attract visitors from search engines so we are left with nothing.

seeker · Sep 18, 2004

Pressure them.

iBizStart · Sep 18, 2004

Pressure them how? With all the money we have? Maybe if you get enough people to take them to court that will send a message. The least they should do is give us a reason or an explanation for their actions.

Steen · Sep 18, 2004

byalik said:
This sucks for all of us? We finally get a good domain name and start earning revenue on adsense and they just cancel our account. What are our alternatives? THere are none? We can't park the domains because we are using websites/content to attract visitors from search engines so we are left with nothing.

Maybe put some effort into finding advertisers yourself?

They usually pay more anyways (from my experience). If you put Adsense on NSFW (not saying you did), obviously they will close your account.

j8jweb said:
True, but wait until this happens to you, with several hundred (or even several thousand) dollars sitting in your disabled Adsense account, with no reasonable explanation from Google whatsoever, other than "we felt like it" or similar. It's pretty crap to say the least.

I don't rely on Adsense.

HHH · Sep 20, 2004

Many webmasters have had their Adsense accounts disabled. From memory, nobody has ever had their account reopened or any funds sent to them.

Google lawyers seem to be prepared for any legal threats - not to mention you had to approve of the Adsense TOS before you could join.

Steen said it best, "I don't rely on Adsense" - and neither should you.

Steen · Sep 20, 2004

Just reread this.

I stick to it that Google should be able to close an account for any reason at any time.

However, keeping the money earned up until that point (after your last payout) seems a bit much. Not sure, since you did agree to the terms.

Grey area there, imo.

namedropper · Sep 20, 2004

Yes, but if they have to turn over money earned up to that point, and then someone false clicks their own ads to get money, it'd just be a never ending free cash machine for anyone who wanted to scam Google. That's why they don't pay out when they toss someone out for what they deem to be fraud.

Hey · Sep 20, 2004

namedropper said:
Yes, but if they have to turn over money earned up to that point, and then someone false clicks their own ads to get money, it'd just be a never ending free cash machine for anyone who wanted to scam Google. That's why they don't pay out when they toss someone out for what they deem to be fraud.

Yeah that's true but it sucks for people that didn't actually do anything bad :-(

pleasedelete · Sep 21, 2004

Here is what you can do to help prevent this type of problem: add a bot filtering system to your site which only shows the google ads a few times a day to each IP. No single IP will be able to do any large amount of clicks then.

You might lose a few valid clicks, but it does make for a decent insurance policy.