Warning from google?

[whitebark]

Just got this in my email inbox:

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have
been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of
third-party programmes paid or provided with other incentives to visit
your site. Such programmes may include, but are not limited to
auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read or pay-to-click sites.


It would be funny if it wasn't serious! I'm dumb but not stupid, why would I pay for a service to screw myself with?

I hinted at this before - what is stopping someone who doesn't like you from hiring such a service to screw you over? I've read about people doing this to their competition before and I have a sneaky suspicion that that is what is going on here with me.

What makes it worse is they don't tell you which account or website this is happening with. Now I have to wade through gigs of server data over dozens of websites to see if I can find anything.

Grrr...

 

[hugegrowth]

do you use the channels feature on google adsense? with that you can see your page impressions and clicks for each site or page, if you set it up that way. better than using the same code for all your sites, then you don't know where are your hits and clicks are coming from.

 

[olebean]

You could always say you are pleased they found they and you wish to co-operate to ensure that the origin of the clicks are stopped.

If they accuse you sue!

 

[whitebark]

do you use the channels feature on google adsense? with that you can see your page impressions and clicks for each site or page, if you set it up that way. better than using the same code for all your sites, then you don't know where are your hits and clicks are coming from.

i use channels for all my websites,some even broken down to individual pages/sections of the websites. I'm using adsense on 1plus without channels though.

I'm not looking forward to spending many hours wading through server logs looking for suspicious traffic...

You could always say you are pleased they found they and you wish to co-operate to ensure that the origin of the clicks are stopped.

I emailed them back immediately saying i want to co-operate but they need to throw me a bone and tell me which account at least!

 

[Jacksplat]

i lost my adsense account recently from issues not mine. with that i researched heavily into "lost adsense accounts" and came across many pissed off individuals hell-bent on taking out the ppc system with the main target being googles advertisers and publishers. it's possible your site/s were randomly hit by one of the thousands of "haters" prowling for google ads. many of them did nothing to lose thier account and are in a state of perpetual rebelion. the other possibility is what you mentioned about competition. there isnt much info on it but knowing how adsense bans accounts so easily and without deep investigation your competition has several ways to take you down with little or no money out of pocket. for the most part they opt for the cheap option of going to your site and abusing the clicks every day until it's noticed. the other option is paying a small fee to put your site into that click pool, i'm sure thats an effective option. i found so much info on this issue i couldnt read it all.

you not only lose your account, but you lose money owed to you as well. i lost alot, which will be a real pain to recover when i do. fortunately theres an adwords office only 4hrs from me in a city i happen to frequent.

my best advice Roy: get to work immediately on saving your name with them. they dont need any one publisher so it's up to you to prove yourself. hard to suggest what info to offer them, i instantly offered them root access to my servers..im talkin instantly, i gave 0 time to hide any possible logs. they had no interest in the time it requires to see if i was honest.

good luck buddy.

Kevin

 

[whitebark]

Thanks Kevin - I don't know whether that makes me feel better or worse!

Google-bowling is another tactic of getting your competition banned from google search results and it too takes very little effort or money. Doing it to adsense like you say is the same thing.

I've yet to hear anything back from them, and I suspect I might not. At least they gave me warning of impending doom. That's better than most cases we read about - but then most of them you can tell were up to no good!

 

[Jacksplat]

some may have noticed since my advertising revenue became and easy attack point, ive never splashed my sites in a sig of any forum again. I piss people off more often than not, my sites in sigs become the easy target for people who wanna kick me in the teeth.

 

[JMJ]

I've noticed when I post names for sale on the boards at times someone will visit multiple names in the list and click all sorts of links on the parking pages. The clicks always get removed and I can always tell abnormal behavior so I know they are going to get removed but it makes me wonder if there are "kids" playing around with peoples businesses. If you think about it, it's just as bad as having your forum hacked if not worse to lose your source of income on a site or sites. IE Getting banned from adsense because someone who has some beef with you clicks on your ads enough to get you banned. Same could hold true for parking I guess if it happened enough.

Jacksplat, I guess I'm not the only one then.

 

[whitebark]

What do we as publishers do then? We are almost powerless if you think about it. We are held hostage to the whims of competitors or punks.

 

[Jacksplat]

Roy's a good guy and it's my opinion he wouldnt attempt the easy revenue through click fraud, I also believe he wouldn't be so stupid. I hope you become an example of one of the ones who is given the benefit of the doubt. You have alot to lose wth this issue.

What do we as publishers do then? We are almost powerless if you think about it. We are held hostage to the whims of competitors or punks.

There's nothing you can do.

For the most part many of the people I've read about who have lost their accounts were earning less than 100 a month (just a noticed occurance). that led some to believe the low publishers on the ladder were targets of adsense. But if you look enough you will find good earners too lost their accounts. I earned 100 a day so this has nothing to do with your value to them. Many have said that high ctr is a trigger for investigation, I feel thats possible as its an easy way to discover cheating. I have 50 .ca with between 21% to 100% CTR, the greater of them are above 50%. Could be the 5-10 with 100% and had good traffic considering were a large factor. What really sucks is they do not give you any detail of your warnings or bans, they keep the door open for speculation in many cases.

 

[whitebark]

Thanks for the kind words Kevin.

At this point they haven't replied, and they have yet to ban my account(s). I just checked in and they are still recording impressions and clicks as per normal.

At this point I am resigned to the worst, but it really bothers me because I have not done anything. C'est la vie...

 

[simon]

may be u can remove adsense for one week or so
i think its better option than being banned and stop using them for ever

 

[whitebark]

may be u can remove adsense for one week or so
i think its better option than being banned and stop using them for ever

That's what I was thinking as well.

Anyone ever try this approach?

 

[copper]

Sorry to hear this.

I got warning email from google as well.
In my case, it was just warning.
Nothing else happened.

They'll never tell you detail :-(

I hope all goes well with you

 

[whitebark]

Thanks Copper - I also hope it is just a warning and nothing more. I'm going to take it off of my sites for at least a week just in case.

 

[everydayprofit]

I had a friend who was banned from Google a while back. He owns a recording studio, nearly 30 synthesizers, and a HUGE synthesizer and music website. One day while viewing through his pages...he saw some links for discounts on synths and such. He clicked the links and bought a number of synthesizers. About a week later, he was banned from Google for having clicks generated from his own IP address. He sent them a number of emails stating what he had done...and that he was legitimately interested in visiting the sponsored sites..and that he had actually made a number of purchases that way. Eventually..they reinstated his account. I thought for sure they wouldn't, and told him that...but they did. You may be surprized at how helpful they may be. You never know!

//everydayprofit

 

[.biz]

I guess some google haters just hitted my site, so I got my account banned a week ago.. hell lost lots of revenue.

The more google banned people without any warning or investigations, the more google haters. And this large group of haters will bring google's adsense business to its knee, if they successfully make half of the publishers banned.

 

[Dale Hubbard]

From the other perspective, it looks like an effective way for individuals or organisations to retaliate for having lost domains to catchers etc.

 

[copper]

I wonder if google will come up with better solutions than just
banning acct. left and right without further investigation.

Google should know that if this continues too long, publishers
will abandon adsense and go with YPN, upcoming MSN and
affiliate links :-(

 

[JMJ]

You would think that instead of banning account holders with all of the brainpower they have on payroll over there they would have come up with the idea of banning the IPs doing the clicking. See how long it occurs when those clickers can't access Google. Grant it they could use proxies but when those IPs get blocked thats the end of that story.