Over the years, Google has published posts like these, little FAQs that tell you nothing useful.
Just once I wish they'd answer the only question anybody really has: what do I do if I'm innocent? What if Google made a mistake? There's a clear path forward for organizations who admit wrongdoing and promise to change, but no one can help you if you've done nothing wrong.
This blog post is a slap in the face. Google should be ashamed.
We had been using AdSense for 10 years and had our account disabled after a competitor used a bot to click on the ads 10k+ times. This particular individual messaged me after doing so and bragged about how our account would be banned.
We forwarded the message to Google, asked them to remove those clicks, and told them we took measures to prevent this individual from doing it again. The next month, we were banned by Google on pay day. We appealed and got an automated denial. When we tried to get information from our Google contacts, we were told to make sure our family wasn't clicking on the ads.
Fortunately, we weren't reliant on AdSense, but it was insulting to be treated like children by this company. I'm glad that I won't have to deal with such an unethical company again, at least until they randomly disable my Google account.
So, to sum up this blog post: your competitors can spend a couple bucks to shut you down permanently, and Google will treat you like a child.
I won't generalize here and say all Google support sucks, Google support for both Adwords and AdSense sucks so incredibly bad.
I don't understand how their CORE money making products can be staffed by untrained and in my experience uneducated foreign workers.
I've been an AdWords customer for probably 10 years, I won't say how much money I've spent (on behalf of clients) because it would sound like bragging but you would think with that much I'd get some sort of concierge treatment, or at least some sort of "direct line."
Even basic questions and support tickets don't get answered correctly, or in a timely manner.
The sad part is their marketing is so on point. I get clients that get coupons in the mail all the time looking to sign up, and end up not signing up because they arent willing to deal with a non-English speaking person reading from a "conditional logic support script."
FWIW my understanding is, the support only sucks on the "paying for ads" side of things. Advertisers, the ones bringing money in, not the ones taking it out, receive extremely good service.
Depending on what you mean by support, when one of my youtube videos was falsely copyright claimed, I disputed it and the claim was removed. When another video was falsely flagged as violating a rule, I disputed it and the flag was removed. When someone started repeatedly stealing my videos and uploading them to their own channels, I reported them for copyright infringement, and the first time it took 1 day to be taken down, subsequent claims only took 30 minutes for the takedown.
Actually, it could be. If the phone was bought from the Google store, they serve you directly. I had my Nexus 5X replaced after a conversation with Google (not LG).
I used them 7+ years until a few weeks back. I had one aging website I literally had not posted anything new to in about 3+ years, and rarely visited. It made enough to have withdraw possible every few months. The only thing I can think of is the few videos on a youtube channel with a few thousand views posted about a year back. They probably were making $5/year. I'm not sure how I am banned for invalid ad clicks when I was barely making any revenue or have traffic. No explanation. Appeal sent on the 16th of Feb saying it will take a week or more to process. Still waiting. What a a joke.
Whoever that competitor is, you should publically blast them assuming you have the proof you say. I'd make it my life's work to call them out as often as possible if I were you. People who operate business like this, need to be called out and blacklisted.
When Google Migrated to GSuite they stole my domain by locking me out of any means of renewing, transferring, after I purchased it when they launched Google Domains ~2004. The domain in question happened to be have an interested party, because apparently they had somehow set up Google Apps for domains and were using it for email (this was a car dealership). They contacted me offering $5,000 to buy it. I couldn't even sell or renew it.
Same here. I was bringing this up in a thread here a few days ago and was downvoted but it is a disgrace to work with clients in such a disconnected way.
Around the same time I created a web page just for currency exchange in my country, a kind of fire and forget page that had like a thousand visitors a day, nothing big. I swear to god that I've never ever clicked an ad on that page which I seldom visited, once a month I checked my winnings and they were adding up like $5 a month on average...
Then all of a sudden bam!, unplugged without any reason, they stole my money and never gave any chance to appeal. Sent an email that got an automated response, sent another one got the same automated response, then gave up.
They served all the ads, they got all the money from advertisers, they pocketed it all including my goddamn money.
Plain thievery if you ask me, no matter how you dress it with all the PR in the world.
Yeah right, after five years? Do you think they returned the money? What if most advertisers were one off shots to hit the jackpot on a new startup and failed within six months? Who did they give the money back? Their own pockets?
Come on, PR may say "oh no, we give that money to charity" while texting from a yacht in the middle of the caribbean.
Given Google's continuous refusal to provide an adequate resolution mechanism despite all the negative PR, we can only assume they have a strong financial motivation to not provide it.
Interestingly, AdSense bans are almost always around pay day. We don't know what they do with the funds after an account is banned — we can only go on their word and goodwill, which we know is not to be trusted.
> my winnings and they were adding up like $5 a month on average...
> they pocketed it all including my goddamn money.
It's worth pointing out that it's not your money until it's in your bank account and they can't claw it back. Unless you are really driving serious traffic, it's best not to expect any payout from any of these ad platforms
>It's worth pointing out that it's not your money until it's in your bank account and they can't claw it back. Unless you are really driving serious traffic, it's best not to expect any payout from any of these ad platforms
Google banned my Play Developer account business account and everything associated with it. My colleague got everything in Google banned because he had a college project uploaded in his developer account which apparently used a hollywood star in his app screenshots.
He lost his play dev account, gmail, google docs and adsense. Banned FOREVER.
Do NOT trust google with your business or use their business suite. They have no interest in customer support
I have customer support for business account but apparently the banning is done by some other team and this customer support has no way to reach them. They don't even respond to emails.
I spoke to Google senior engineer on his reddit AMA thread who agreed that I was banned due to mistake in their bot but he never logged on to reddit again to help me out.
At first it seems like they'd finally clarify exactly how to address the problem: "Understanding ... suspension" - "Oh! Finally, I'll get my answers", but then manage to do none of that. At least they use a nice and friendly conversational style so the user feels a temporary comfort before being told to go fuck themselves.
It is a very good example of PR and corporate-speak. They were criticized for not addressing the problem before. So they've managed to address the problem ... but without really addressing is.
Now I guess they probably meant to say "we don't want to disclose how to prove your innocence because then fraudsters would figure out how to game that". For example, I would have probably just told customers that, and maybe apologized. Or you know, maybe hired some more customer support people to handle individual cases. But that's why I don't do corporate PR and just write code instead.
If you can figure out what is the problem... I had a similarly frustrating experience on why my simple blog was banned... probably around the same year as you. It's pretty rich that Google post claims that it is increasing transparency. Still sounds very opaque.
The URL they gave was the home page and they wouldn't provide any specific information. I was already banned. The only theories I had at the time was related to the very international traffic of my blog. As WordPress developer very active in the community I had a lot of international traffic and some of it was trying all types of strange hacks on my site. I used it as a bit of a honeypot. I couldn't find any specific traffic that made sense so. My other theory had me blaming CloudFlare, who at the time, and undocumented, would throw up ads if the traffic seemed suspicious. The only way I found out about that was thanks to an Eastern European coworker, who let me know.
Though that post makes it sounded like that blog might not have been banned for life like the emails from Google at the time implied.
I could have likely used my own network of Google friends to get more clues, but the ad revenue was a trickle and I really only had it on to test the related WordPress plugins and to experience the same interfaces and workflows as my customers. It wasn't worth anyone's time.
I'm also reminded in those years my boss at the time Matt Mullenweg wrote, "Google Adsense, which has been declining in quality and is no longer a great choice for bloggers".
https://ma.tt/2011/10/federated-media-deal/
What are the popular advertising networks for small, independent bloggers now?
The Deck is one, although they're specifically meant for the arts/creative sector. They have a serious privacy policy and the ads are unobtrusive, though of course that means the rates are lower.
This happened to me when I was in college- I had been running a small forum and it made enough to help with school books but not much else. They left the ads running on my site until I attempted to withdraw the money, at which point they suspended me with no recourse. This was the first of many very disappointing encounters with Google, and I always try to stress to people that if they are at all reliant on Google for money they are basically playing the lottery with their livelihood. I'll be the first to admit I'm still bitter over this, but as a college student with not a lot of money Google's decision to steal from me had a real impact.
SAME. No explanation; I did nothing to violate any policy, which involves clicking my own ads or suggesting to my users to do the same. A larger proportion of the revenue was the 100,000+ page views a day. They did nothing when this suspension was appealed besides the same old response, and ignored any appeal.
"We have found that there are two types of publishers who may have invalid traffic issues with their accounts. The first are publishers who may unintentionally send invalid traffic to their accounts, typically by testing on live ads. For those, we hope that increased transparency into our policies and processes can decrease these unintentional violations and help our publishers play by the rules. The second are publishers who intentionally bypass our rules, ending up with a variety of invalid traffic issues in order to artificially inflate their ad revenue. That’s why we work hard to maintain a policy compliant ecosystem for our publishers, advertisers, and users. In short, if you play by the rules, AdSense is here to help you grow your business."
I feel that this a slap in the face to any people who face malicious adsense abuse traffic in an effort to attack their site. Google has once again just brushed this by.
This is how you know it's an authentic Google publication. Written as if to address kids and juveniles, it's all your fault and we're not telling you why.
The ultimate insult are the "helpful tips" like "don't ask friends and family to click ads".
"We recommend learning how to segment your traffic to help you best understand, monitor, and evaluate the traffic to your site. This may also help you identify sources of invalid traffic."
May, might, could... Google is happy to continue to encourage a whole industry of SEO and Adsense snake oil salesmen.
I lost $100K+ on AdSense due to what I believe is a nasty competitor seeking to get my account disabled. After making the case to Google, they said they would reinstate the account and pay me what was owed. I then suggested measures that we were going to take on our end to prevent competitors from doing that again, and lo and behold, 24 hours later the Google rep tells me I'm not getting paid. No lawyer was willing to take the case, because it's Google.
I literally lost $100,000 because I suggested to Google that we would take proactive measures to prevent fraud. As if having the knowledge to do so meant we were committing fraud.
No lawyer was willing to take the case, because it's Google.
That seems bizarre. The last account I read of an actual legal action against Google was a small claims procedure for a few thousand, and IIRC the conclusion was that Google basically didn't show up on court day and lost by default. I could understand not working on contingency if a lawyer feels the case isn't clear-cut, but no-one taking a six-figure case? Surely they must have had more than just "It's Google" to put them off if everyone was saying no?
Seriously. I'm a lawyer and I'll take the case. Since no one else wants it, let's do it on a contingency basis. (I am a lawyer, but that was not an actual offer -- just an offer to discuss.)
Another would be to file a claim in small claims court for the max allowed there -- say $10k or whatever and see what happens. You could even represent yourself there after doing a few hours research. Judges will practically let you write your briefs in crayon in some jurisdictions.
Lawyers are really expensive. You would need to turn it into a class action or you would be blowing through a ton of money, up against the best lawyers in the game.
IP-related lawsuits are notoriously expensive, but what we're talking about here seems to be alleged breach of contract. The discovery process ought to obtain Google's records of ad views and whatever they're relying on to justify withholding the payment, and then either they have enforceable terms that allow them to do that or they don't.
I know the US legal system has an awful reputation for costing lots of money that mostly only goes to the lawyers, but really, if you can't effectively enforce your rights even after being ripped off to the tune of $100,000, your legal system is literally worthless to any normal person. I find it hard to believe that even the US system is that crazy.
I didn't reach out to many lawyers. After hearing a few not wanting to be David against Goliath, I just came to terms that I should not be building a business on a revenue stream like Adsense where an automated review can mean the difference between being in business and not, and moved on. I sense you may be implying that maybe I was breaking the TOS, but know that we were getting paid significant amount by Google already, and had no business practice change by the time we were canned at the $100K level.
I didn't reach out to many lawyers. After hearing a few not wanting to be David against Goliath, I just came to terms that I should not be building a business on a revenue stream like Adsense where an automated review can mean the difference between being in business and not, and moved on.
Fair enough. Can't argue against being pragmatic in business.
I sense you may be implying that maybe I was breaking the TOS
No, that wasn't my intent at all. I was just reasoning that if you had a deal with Google where you would normally expect to be paid, they would need some basis for not paying you (or, one would hope, they would lose the case and you'd get your money). They might be unhelpful in terms of not telling you why that is at first, but if you're taking real legal action they can't just say "Not gonna tell ya!" any more (or again, one would hope, they lose the case). If they did come back with something from their terms as their justification, then you would have to see whether those terms stood up in court.
It also looks (from the summary you linked) like the lead plaintiff had somehow admitted to multiple violations of the TOS and failed to follow some sort of required dispute procedure, though, so from what you said before, that doesn't sound like the same situation that you were/are in.
There are no slam dunks in cases like this? I would have at least had a lawyer send a letter and maybe file the case to see if they would have released the funds. I don't think they have legality to keep what he has earned even if it was from a thousand or two dollars in illegal clicks. Their system can decipher bad from good clicks, then it can tell you how much is rightfully owed.
Of course there is risk involved in any formal legal action. But equally, a business is not above the law just because it has a lot of money, and having expensive lawyers doesn't magically mean you win every case.
With $100K in dispute, it would be surprising if no lawyer would even be willing to take the first steps, or if the cost of paying one to do so would be so outrageous that it wasn't worth considering if Google really were pulling a fast one.
What do you mean by "lost $100K+". Does that include revenue from potentially fraudulent traffic?
The thing is, if it's impossible to tell if that traffic was fraudulent, Google is most likely reimbursing the advertisers. It's not like they are putting the money in their pocket.
I've definitely talked to other people who tried to monetize with Google, had their ads shut off with no clue why, and were looking for new solutions. So it isn't a rare story. Google is sort of the PayPal of ads in terms of incorrect account freezes and bans that never get resolved.
I don't even bother with their advertising solutions in my mobile apps any more since competitors generally offer better pay for the same clicks with less hassle.
Based on this, it should be easy to get your competitors' accounts suspended. And as always with Google, there's no appeal process - you just gotta hope your story makes it to the front page of reddit/HN/other.
When I did SEO, it was extremely easy to drop a page or entire website off the first page by buying a ton of trash links to them. Even disavowing links in Google's Webmaster tools (a feature they introduced to combat that) did little to restore them. I imagine PPC is even easier (just buy tons of views/clicks) and harder to fix. It's basically a DDoS on your revenue accounts.
Much like many of the other commenters in this thread we had our account banned and were never told why. We were not doing anything against the terms of service (and they never accused us of doing so). We didn't have "invalid traffic". We had millions of users and an account rep at Google.
Since then we've transitioned completely away from ad based revenue which in my opinion is much better anyway because it aligns our interests better with our users (they are now our customers not our product).
I find this suggestion very funny: "Additionally, YouTube publishers should skip ads when viewing their own videos to avoid artificially inflating advertiser costs."
Maybe they should recommend installing an ad-blocker :)
An ad-blocker for publishers is actually very good idea. Don't forget to install on all of your teams' devices, and on the devices of friends and relatives.
They somewhat do have a tool (although I don't think it works with YouTube ads). The Google Publisher Toolbar works decent for testing ads on your page (you can click and doesn't count), block ads, and reporting ads.
For a long time now cybercriminals can and will target the ads of people/groups/companies they don't like to make Google flag your account as suspicious and get it closed.
We had a site that was banned with little explanation. We eventually got it reactivated but never got a good answer as to why. My guess is because the ads did really well and CTRs were crazy good. We had an Adwords account banned at one point too. Totally different site but also really good CTRs and we were able to optimize things to achieve really low CPCs. I think if your Google Adsense/Adwords accounts do well in these areas to an extreme that doesn't appear normal, their automated system bans you. Problem is then getting in touch with someone who can get you unbanned. The run-around is crazy and it can take months and cost you a ton of money.
It's a testament to Google's dominance that Adsense can be so opaque and frustrating related to abuse or suspensions and still be mostly unchallenged after a decade. I'd love to see an alternative, but I've seen nothing on the horizon.
Actually, "network" was the wrong term to use. It's a company that utilizes header bidding and machine learning to maximize revenue. (To keep my anonymity, I won't name the company.) There are many companies that do the same thing.
I would never work with a single ad network ever again. I wasted a lot of time testing different ones.
Given all of the people in this thread complaining about Google stealing their money and these same sorts of stories I've constantly heard over the years, has anyone seriously considered joining forces in a class-action suit against Google?
I personally don't have a dog in this fight, but it also seems like this keeps happening because they haven't been punished for doing it.
I've written about this in a recent thread. Google truly needs to face a massive class action lawsuit regarding this.
I hate that sort of thing but they are large enough not to care and the only way they will care (well, at least fake forced care) is if they kicked in the balls very, very hard. The only way for this to happen is a massive class action lawsuit.
It is beyond obvious they have caused untold damage to thousands of businesses who, after deciding to trust their products to create a revenue stream, get cutoff summarily for reasons beyond their control.
This thread has enough people with stories of real (and very unfair) damage that attorneys frequenting HN should take notice.
Years ago I put Google's ads on my website. Just before the revenue reached the payout threshold they disabled my account and withheld all the money I had earned up to that point. No detailed explanation, no appeal. While I can't prove anything I was left with the distinct feeling that I was being scammed.
In 2004, shortly after Google launched Gmail, I put some ads on a friend's website that had about 10 monthly visitors, using my gmail account. The ads didn't really bring in any money, and then we got a notice about "fraudulent clicks" where they took away the $2 we had earned. So we took them down.
12 years later, my account is still blocked from signing up for Google ads.
We once spent a small amount of money advertising with Google, just to try it out for a new business.
The referring page with the most "visitors" was literally a bunch of buzzwords in something like 6pt grey on slightly darker grey text. It was like some sort of spoof stereotype of an ad-abusing landing page, which any crude detection algorithm I could imagine would have red-flagged. Various other pages were similarly obviously deceptive.
We wrote off the small amount of money since it wasn't worth legal action to recover it, called it a lesson learned, and none of my businesses has ever given Google a penny in ad spend in the years since.
Screw Adsense. I mean it. Google's policies over these matter are more opaque than functioning of NSA and their responses or FAQs are worse than the well rehearsed statements of scandalous politicians.
We found moving to native ads to be significantly more profitable when you have a website that has lot of genuine content. For me adsense = spammy ads.
We were blocked twice by adsense in past (two different companies owning two different web properties) for perfectly legitimate traffic giving no excuse what so ever.
This post and comments bring back too many bad memories and horrible experience I had with Google Adsense banning my account, with automated responses. I better build my own product or services , I learnt years ago.
In this post they say, if a user clicks again and again... so don't ask your friend to-do so, what kind of bs is this, how they know if the user was our competitor or some ex friend doing to hurt.... they just go ahead and suspend...
Look, I suppose you're right, but it is the first line on my HN profile. If I was trying to dupe folks, I probably would have done something different.
is it possible (as in, allowed) to have dedicated Google Account just for AdSense? it's very risky to tie this to account where you have Play Developer, GSuite and Cloud attached to it.
I hope someone at Google reads this thread and shares it with the relevant team. They really need to provide proper customer service for products where money is involved.
Unfortunately, Google has long been aware of the issue, and presumably chooses to do nothing about it. I have suspicions as to why this is, as I'm sure others do. When it comes to HN discussions about AdSense, Google typically gets their resident HN employee to flag threads, talk condescendingly, and accuse others of lying.
Or the third source of bad traffic: Third parties you have no control over heating clicks because of free registration spam, comment spam, generating "legitimate looking" accounts for later credit card fraud, or plain ddos reasons.
And there's no human being to discuss this with, or even get details from.
Note that this blog itself has dozens of suspicious or obvious bot spam comments. If Google can't filter this out, how am I supposed to?
Oh adsense. I had my account blocked after spending a few thousand for ad generating sites on flippa. No transparency on there end, no ability to appeal, life time block.
On a side note it seems like a good racket, sell people ad generating sites then click on adds a few times after the sale and buy it back at a discount.
Around 2004/2005 about a year after Adsense launched some friends and I from Stanford made a fake company and blogged about high CPC adwords content, then made a couple hundred bucks clicking our own links... received payment, never got shut down.
Yet in the same time period I ran a website that was legit, made a few hundred bucks, and then when I tried to withdraw that money had my account closed for click fraud. It was only a few hundred bucks but as a poor college student it really sucks for google to essentially mug me.
So Google seems to err on the side of assuming too much traffic is bots, but from what I read in the general ad tech media it seems all other players err on the side of assuming to much traffic is human.
Over the years, Google has published posts like these, little FAQs that tell you nothing useful.
Just once I wish they'd answer the only question anybody really has: what do I do if I'm innocent? What if Google made a mistake? There's a clear path forward for organizations who admit wrongdoing and promise to change, but no one can help you if you've done nothing wrong.