

How I lost my Adsense account - rahoulb
http://www.stateofsearch.com/how-i-lost-my-adsense-account/

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zach
Many people wonder why Google never provides a reason for cancelling an
account like this. The answer is that any reason they provide would also be
seen as their opening argument. They're not interested in arguing whether
their reasons are valid, so they don't even give a reason.

If you give people a reason, the implication is that there is a deficiency
which can be improved, a fault which can perhaps be forgiven, or a set of
circumstances which can be seen another way. It gives people a place to begin
an argument, and this is clearly a case where people are eager to do so.

Google doesn't want to start a conversation, they want to remove the
participant from the program. Not having a reason makes that clear, and
providing reasons makes that less clear.

It's the same dynamic when salespeople want to know why you don't want to buy
— they're hoping they can persuade you to set aside those concerns and leave
you with no rational reason not to make the purchase.

It's also the reason why, if you dump a needy romantic partner, you're better
off not providing concrete reasons — the reason is just that you want the
relationship to be over! You don't want them running after you screaming, "But
I can change!"

In this case with AdSense, sifting out the accounts who "sometimes" break the
rules from complete scammers is probably just deemed to be not worth the
trouble. Doing things this way also helps establish that they are tough on
fraud.

Also, as Google themselves say, they don't want to help give those who are
gaming the system to get any more information than necessary about what sets
off their alarms or trips the trigger to deactivate an account. But even so,
there are good reasons to not give reasons.

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philbarr
I'm surprised Google couldn't tell him what it was. Exactly what are they
protecting by not telling people what rules they've broken?

Surely, all the breakable rules are in the T's & C's anyway?

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lnanek
I've been temp banned from Google Groups just by opening a bunch of posts in
tabs before going through and reading them all. So it isn't just what you do,
it's the amount. I've seen ad networks complain when ads just strangely get
too many clicks before compared to what their ads usually get. Saw one demand
the ad be placed further away from any buttons in the UI due to this, etc..

If Google was more specific, fraudsters could probably figure out how many
fake clicks per day per IP are allowed, etc.. While innocent people like the
author will get banned once or twice, fraudsters will probably go through tons
of accounts, maybe one for each family member, for example. So the fraudsters
are going to be picking up data due to experiencing many more bans than
innocents.

Heck, if the innocents all blog about it afterwards like this one, they are
just acting like an extra data point for the fraudsters anyway, and most of
them have so little traffic that banning them or not and telling them details
or not will never make a difference to Google. So hiding details from them
hides them from fraudsters too, although treating them this way is probably
due to the expense of dedicating resources to worthless customers more than
that. Let's say you have a million users and 10 customer support reps. Which
users are you going to support and tailor your polices to? The ones with
appreciable traffic who make most of your money.

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csomar
tldr; The author asks users to click his Adsense ads and gets banned for it.
'lesson learned'.

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zalew
Yeah, nothing new, one of the basic rules of adsense since forever.

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sireat
Basic rule true, but the guy did it 7 years ago on his first site. If we are
to believe him, he wasn't doing anything against Google rules currently.

As he mentions, it is like being sentenced to life for shoplifting a candy bar
when you were a teenager. There is no appeal nothing(unless you can somehow
bring attention to public).

~~~
zalew
I'm not going to defend google on their practices, I also think it's too
harsh, but they probably just don't separate accidental offenders with full-
time scammers (just like with panda algo, etc.). Luckily for us all, adsense
is not the only context ad program, if you have a valuable traffic channel you
have the option to move on to competition - it's their loss too.

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conradfr
So much precautions in the text to maybe get his account back, funny.

