Beware of the "Ruthlessness of Google"

[Sporty]

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Given my deflating experience over the last few days I would advise everyone to treat their Google AdSense ads with the greatest caution and be on the constant look-out for fraudulent clicks.

Up until last Saturday we had every respect for Google and had built up a nice little business around them but then the following message came up when I tried to access my account:

“Account Not Active
An AdSense account does not exist for this login, as it is associated with an unapproved application. For more information about your application, please review the message we sent to the email address you provided with your application.”


A little while later we received the following email:

“Subject: Google AdSense Account Disabled

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). 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
- a publisher encouraging others to click on his ads
- automated clicking programs or any other deceptive software
- a publisher altering any portion of the ad code or changing the layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads for any reason

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

Publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed further participation in AdSense and do not receive any further payment. The earnings on your account will be properly returned to the affected advertisers.”


We replied and received the following template response:

“Thank you for your email.

As you know, Google treats instances of invalid clicks very seriously. By disabling your account, we feel that we have taken the necessary measures to ensure that invalid clicks will not continue to occur on your site. Due to the proprietary nature of our monitoring system, we're not able to disclose any specific details of these clicks.

Publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed further participation in Google AdSense. However, if you can maintain in good faith that the invalid clicks we detected on your ads were not due to your actions or negligence, or the actions or negligence of others working for you, you may appeal the closing of your account.

Google reserves sole discretion in considering whether to take any action on an appeal.

In order to appeal the disabling of your account, please reply to this email with the details requested below. We're unable to consider appeals that do not contain all of this information:

- Your name

- Your company's name (if applicable)

- Your publisher ID number (located in the AdSense code on your website with the format, pub-################)

- Your website's URL

- Date your account was disabled

- Your website's audience

- The source of your website's content

- Frequency of content updates

- The primary sources of your website's traffic

- The number of people involved with the administration of the site

- Any relevant information that you believe would explain the invalid click activity we detected

If Google decides to evaluate your appeal, we will do our best to inform you quickly and will proceed with appropriate action as necessary. If we have reached a decision on your appeal, subsequent or duplicate appeals may not be considered."


The same day we sent off a 4 page appeal but three days later received the following standard response:

“Thank you for your appeal.

After receiving your response, we re-reviewed your account data thoroughly. We have reconfirmed that invalid clicks were generated on the ads on your site in violation of our Terms and Conditions and programme policies.

https://www.google.com/adsense/terms
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies

We have implemented these policies to help ensure the effectiveness of Google ads for our publishers as well as our advertisers. According to our policy on this matter, we are unable to reinstate you into the programme.

Please bear in mind that subsequent or duplicate appeals may not be considered and you may not receive any further communication from us. We appreciate your understanding.”



We are therefore out of Google and the small business that we had built up on 2 content related websites appears finished. I have heard similar stories and have had very little sympathy because obviously the people concerned were fraudsters and got what they deserved. Now I am not so sure!!!

We have not participated in any click fraud activity and find such a concept both repugnant and contrary to the moral standards that we keep. We have also taken great care to avoid accidental clicks. How has the problem arisen? Obviously there have been fraudulent clicks on the website for Google to take such prompt action. Where have they originated from - perhaps an automated clicking programme or some other deceptive software carried out in Russia, India or China – I do not know?

What I do know is that Google faces a huge problem in tackling the issue of fraudulent clicks and are understandably now taking every measure to address the problem. From their perspective the confidence of the market must be maintained to ensure that advertising revenue to Google is maintained and continues to increase in line with their business model.

However if a small web publisher like ourselves find themselves in the firing line as the result of external fraudulent activity they will have no hesitation whatsoever to “take the publisher out with utter ruthlessness.” Over the last few days I have trawled the internet and have come across numerous other innocents with similar stories.

At the same time we have lost a four figure sum of earnings that had been accrued but not paid. Whilst the advertisers subject to fraudulent clicks are refunded there is no indication where the rest of the forfeiture goes. However, we can all guess!


What lessons are there to be learnt from our experience for the rest of our web publisher friends?

1. Take great care on the issue of fraudulent clicks. You can easily be the next one to receive the “Google AdSense Account Disabled” email. It could be in your in-box tomorrow morning! There is no way back once you are out.

2. Keep monitoring your logs daily for fraudulent clicks. If you spot anything suspicious notify Google at once. If an event happens when you are on holiday you may be doomed. [Do you know any software that publishers can use to monitor fraudulent clicks activity?]

3. Diversify – do not rely on Google as the main part of your income.

4. Begin to seriously question whether the people at Google are “nice”.

If you have any suggestions how a content publisher can make a comeback after losing Google AdSense we would be extremely grateful. What PPC companies would you recommend? Any ideas when the Yahoo Publisher Network will get to the UK?


I hope that you can learn from our devastating experience.

Kind regards

Sporty

[pricethat]

I appreciate that it can be a massive blow and certainly disheartning, upsetting and unsettling equally but i do not think that anyone should take these things too personally, much like a little mind block sometimes we get distracted from the fact that this is a business relationship without morals or relationship building.

With regards to your traffic, if google say that there are clicks they do not like then there are clicks they do not like, end of the matter.

Whilst you personally might not of generated these clicks something or someone did, this can be bots crawlers and allsorts of other factors, with such an array of sites out there it is hardly possible or plausible to guide everyone to the exact source of the problem each time.

Google have a duty to protect advertisers, even though anyone can argue they dont do enough they do actually do something and it is that something that has benchmarked your traffic against it's own definition of what it does not like and acted accordingly.

It is ****, really ****, but what did you honestly expect? a pat on the back? some respect for all the hard work that you have put in? I suspect you expecy something or you would not of taken so much time to type all of that out. Had you instead treated the relationship with a different head on then perhaps you would not of actually got so upset about it and just moved on to the other ad networks that are around without even a bat of an eyelid.

I didnt post to be cruel but this does pop its head up from time to time and the only real solution is to not get too emotional over it.

[getvisible]

but i do not think that anyone should take these things too personally

when you're business gets wiped out you're bound to take it personally!

when you're constantly given templated answers you're going to take it personally.

when you're not given sympathy in a moment of sheer disapointment and frustration you're ...

Sporty - sorry to hear it. Many of us have had dissapointments in this industry. Look for alternatives, there are some around. Build up your business and don't let the b'tards get you down.

[topaffiliate]

i think thats rude ....
google should simply make two colums for stats .
Valid clicks= total clicks -(minus) invalid clicks.
i mean if you deliever 1000 clicks to google and 900 are valid 100 are invalid google should pay you for 900 clicks rather disabling your account or not paying at all ...
( sometimes webmasters dont have control over clicks that users r generating)

[Fraser]

I'd agree with exactly what you posted getvisible.

[renegade]

I also agree with getvisible and Fraser and also with topaffiliate's idea of negating invalid clicks.

They could still send out their emails to let webmasters know there's click fraud going on via their links but removing user accounts and sending out standard emails when human intervention is clearly needed is an unacceptable business practice.

I remember when I first read Google do this a couple of years ago I reduced the minimum payout threshold to the minimum so we earn a small amount monthly rather than letting it build up in the account for them to delete it without prior warning.

We also removed adsense from our higher traffic pages to limit our exposure.

If google continues to behave in an ASOS-like fashion the karma merry-go-round will deservedly bite them in the bum at some point.

Check out the new Amazon contextual links, they're still in beta, but seem to offer a suitable alternative for some sites and there are other text link advertising options out there.

[angelabx]

There's also Nixxie.

[valD]

Hmmm. Just taken a look at Nixxie's TOS. This part puts me off:

We will not show results on sites related to the following:

1. Adult-oriented content (However; Content Match is acceptable on adult-only portal sites)
2. Crime: Violence, civil lawsuits, stolen products, theft, etc.
3. Content related to human suffering or death
4. Copyright or trademark-sensitive issues
5. Firearms, weaponry, ammunition, fireworks or explosives
6. Gambling
7. Illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia
8. Propaganda, potentially offensive or controversial content
9. Body parts and bodily fluids
10. Hazardous substances
11. Political, religious or charitable organizations, issues or causes
12. Tobacco and tobacco-related issues
13. Hacking, surveillance, interception or descrambling equipment

Nos. 6 and 11 elimates two of my sites straight away!

[pricethat]

I also agree with getvisible and Fraser and also with topaffiliate's idea of negating invalid clicks.

They could still send out their emails to let webmasters know there's click fraud going on via their links but removing user accounts and sending out standard emails when human intervention is clearly needed is an unacceptable business practice.

I am not out to disagree with everyone, especially as this is and has always been a very charged debate but i have to disagree still, to clarify where i stand i agree that it is rude and people are pissed off with it but i can also see the reasons why too.

If google detail to you to any extent that there is click fraud going on then it leaves them wide open to people working out what their algorythm or proceedure is to detect click fraud. Some of it is obvious like cookie matching between clicks and logins to personal admin panels but other parts are not. If they tell people or warn people it helps the criminals narrow down on ways to bypass googles alerts.

We all know that google could do a lot more but certainly one of those things can never be alerting people to fraudulent clicks, not until they have a foolproof system in place, which at the moment we know they do not. When they do perhaps they can do as someone suggested, discount fraudulent clicks etc, but right now it would make fraud even worse.

If you are a huge google partner providing a noticeable amount of traffic in the scale of things you can be sure that termination without communication does not happen. But one thing is for sure that even if google employed another 10,000 people they could not cope with all of the (dont kill me) insignificant traffic providers in the world.

Zero tolerance policy does work in the corporate world despite what people claim is bad business policy, it forces the whole affiliate channel to do all googles work for them watching things like a hawk so that they dont get booted off their affiliate scheme. Quiet clever really.

I hate google, more than probably many in the forum but this time i really am on the side of google. It is so harsh but i think we can safely say that if google say there is something wrong with some of the traffic from the original posters site then there probably is (after all they are not going to kill their own business for nothing). With that in mind it is against their terms and conditions and therefore quite reasonable for them to terminate in this manner. The gentleman can claim to of done everything to safe guard google from fraudulent clicks but at the end of the day something happened so therefore he didnt do a good enough job did he?

Now the chances are that he did all that we in this forum would say is reasonable, its probably more than likely that some asshole scraper with javascript crawling tried to scrape his site and generated **** loads of clicks, nothing he could do about it? probably, but then if the google revenue was that important and the site owner was aware of googles terms and conditions like he or she should be then they would of limited the amount of connections within a short period of time. To be honest even that probably would not of been enough to satisfy google but what exactly can google do for anyone in this predicament. For sure they can not tell people what or how or even a gentle prewarning, the amount of people kicked off for fraud already is enough prewarning me thinks.

At the end of the day they made a business agreement with you that you agree with when you enrole, they make it quite clear their policy, they make it quite clear their actions, quite clear their payments. Everyone is more than happy when Google honour their payments under their terms, everyone is happy that there is a multi billion pound network that can offer them such a performing revenue stream that they might not of had before. People stop being happy when something in the relationship violates googles terms that previously everyone was all too happy to agree to.

I still do not see what google could of told you that would allow you to sort things out that

a: Would be cost effective to impliment for the thousands of small publishers.
b. Does not give criminals further room to test googles algo's or detection scripts.
c: Does not lead to wider scale problems that would not be present if things stay exactly as they are.

I do not think anyone in this room is stupid, nor do i think the many thousands of staff at google that read this **** each day. There are reasons why things are like they are! Google have certainly shown us already where money is involved, they want to make it!

Does someone want to discuss my points a,b and c?

[Bod]

Google are really up there own arses, remember the soccer am.net site that we looked at last year, the owner was telling everyone to just click 2 or 3 times a day, every day, even though, they didnt wanna buy nothing, what was done to them, jack sh!t.

Poor show from google if you ask me

[Shane]

"leaves them wide open to people working out what their algorythm or proceedure is to detect click fraud"

The Adsense Anti click fraund department is a sleeping donkey !

VAST click fraud is taking place and adsense do combat it..but only on their own terms and at their own speed and they only look where they choose to look... who do you think shout loudest and create positve "Adsense are really strict about click fraud" when their account is canned :

A) a guy doing a hundred to a couple of thousand dollars a month
B) sophsticated click fraud operation reaping tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month

Canning small webmasters is the ideal way to put off other small webmasters from clicking their ads,and send out a message to any advertisers that they are uber strict too.. canned webmasters who have been honest are very annoyed .. enough to complain to all and sundry, air their experience and make plenty of noise about being canned and how strict google are ... on the flipside canning a huge operation would go without a blip as :

1) adsense wouldn't admit it had been going on to that extent unless forced to.
2) the guys who'd banked hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars up to the point they got canned aren't going to complain about it risking legal action to recover the revenue paid up to getting caught.. they'd just swallow the months lost revenue to date and set up new accounts and get back to it with a few changes.

The adsense accounts should be sophisticated enough to allow duplicate and fraudulent clicks to be removed from income and reported etc.. I'm sure Adsense could figure out something amazing if it was of benefit to them...

I guess for now the web press generated from being seen as over strict outweighs any negative aspect... on the plus side of being so strict advertiser confidence is high which keeps bid prices up.

[pricethat]

I think what shane said as well is equally right, probably the real reason but hey ho...

[miked]

Hey,

The frustration felt by posters here really shows how Google are being hurt by their over-relaince on technology at the expense of actually employing people to check things.

If they employed more people then they'd be able to better distinguish between out-and-out fraud and some of the unfortunate cases detailed above. Using automated procedures simply doesn't allow for such flexibility, and injustice is more common.

So, until Google change their business model and go on a massive hiring spree I think we'll continue to see cases like this, and their reputation will continue to suffer.

Mike.

[Dynamoo]

Google never provide the evidence of click fraud. I can see that one day this is going to go to court and I'm pretty sure that Google will be found to be in the wrong.

That having been said, keeping a close eye on your AdSense stats is a good idea. I usually have a look once per day, and usually the earnings are pretty predictable.