How to convince Google that Adsense is not being gamed?

September 9, 2005 10:54 AM

My friend has a very popular website and added Google's textads to it to make some money from the site. But after earning a decent amount of money, Google terminated the ads and accused my friend of falsely inflating the number of hits. My friend was not doing this. My question is whether there are any ways to prove to Google that all the textad hits are legitimate or to otherwise convince Google to allow my friend to have textads on the website again.
posted by EatenByAGrue to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I know someone who had the same problem, but rather than fighting Google he just started with Yahoo text ads. Google has the name recognition, but there are other places to get text ads from.
posted by danb at 11:25 AM on September 9, 2005

ah, the joys of computerized law enforcement!
posted by delmoi at 11:29 AM on September 9, 2005

Also, this is a pretty big security hole. Anyone could 'target' someone's text ads, and force google to remove ads from their site.
posted by delmoi at 11:36 AM on September 9, 2005

The only thing I can think of is that your buddy can provide webserver logs to Google and ask them to try to correlate click-throughs from given IP addresses to IP addresses of people who hit his ads. With enough diversity, it'd be hard to argue that the click-throughs were real. But he'd have to find someone at Google who was interested in doing that legwork, which is a non-trivial amount, and that might be hard for him to do.

(delmoi, I don't think "security hole" is the phrase you're looking for there; there's nothing insecure, or security-averse, about actively trying to click a lot of an enemy's text ads in an effort to get Google to revoke the AdSense membership. Maybe "denial of service," perhaps "malicious," but certainly not a security hole.)
posted by delfuego at 12:11 PM on September 9, 2005

The server logs thing is probably the right approach. They could also cite some Alexa or whatnot statistics and note that the count jibes with what a third party lists as their site's popularity.

Note that your friend may want to see if what Google is seeing is actually some guy that is scraping the site for data repeatedly for his own ad farm site (as has been done frequently with Everything2 and Wikipedia), or even trying to get your friend's ads pulled - being a big site, it may have some antagonists. I really suspect if he runs some analysis on his logs he'll probably see the same repeated hits that Google does.
posted by abcde at 1:34 PM on September 9, 2005

(delmoi, I don't think "security hole" is the phrase you're looking for there; there's nothing insecure, or security-averse, about actively trying to click a lot of an enemy's text ads in an effort to get Google to revoke the AdSense membership. Maybe "denial of service," perhaps "malicious," but certainly not a security hole.)

Um. Well, I disagree.
posted by delmoi at 1:43 PM on September 9, 2005

I googgled this - What to do when you're kicked out of Adsense - though I don't know how trustable source it is.

Sidenote - there are actually (at least) two types of ad click-frauds: 1) clicking on ads on somebody's website to get him kicked out of the ads program, 2) clicking on competitor ads (anywhere) to drain his marketing budget.

I guess it's quite serious problem for Google, maybe even more than all search ranking dirty tricks - virtually all Google revenue comes from ads (around half from ads on Google's own websites and half from AdSense partners).

It seems Google prefers to err on the side of advertisers (i.e. people paying money to them) than on the side of publishers (people getting money from them) - it's easier to get refund on fraudulent AdWords clicks (you get it without asking) than to get un-banned from AdSense (you have to beg them).
posted by b. at 2:46 PM on September 9, 2005

One thing I can't stress enough in dealing with any online business......If you want to communicate importance, and be taken more seriously, deal with the company by postal mail - preferably via certified mail, or send it via FedEx. You stand out and have a better chance of actually being noticed and listened to. Make it professional, to the point, non-accusatory and write as if you expect them to realize it was a mistake and rectify the problem. It truly makes a difference.
posted by Independent Scholarship at 3:46 PM on September 9, 2005