• My site is too small to bother with.
• My site's design is too antiquated.
• They don't like me using the word "hacks" to describe my software.
• ACME Mapper is too similar to Google Maps.
• I am in fact a click-spammer but I'm playing dumb.

My post about this went a little bit viral on Google+. Lots of comments, lots of re-shares. Maybe half the comments were from other former AdSense partners saying they had gotten the same form letters.

I want to highlight two of the comments. First, by Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google:

I can't easily imagine Jef Poskanzer was click-spamming AdSense, while at the same time I trust the judgment and abilities of the AdSense team.

Another Google+er, Viswa Vutharkar, said this:

Take this example scenario. Someone who hates acme.com created an elaborate bot net or somehow influenced some legion of their followers to simply visit acme website and click on ads willy nilly. Its no fault of acme.

Anyway all the attention on Google+ got the AdSense folks to re-re-review my case. The attention did not affect the outcome, it just got me a third chance, which I am very grateful for. And the result was, I was reinstated. Yay!

So the first thing I did after my account was turned back on was to go look at my stats. That's when I found out that AdSense had been absolutely right to flag my account. There was a big bulge in the stats between late November and early January. Views remained about the same while clicks rose by about a factor of eight. I had nothing to do with it, of course. But AdSense has to defend itself and its advertisers against stuff like this.

However. The way AdSense defends itself is, I think, poor. As we saw above, the lack of specifics makes people play crazy guessing games. It detracts from Google's reputation for trying to do the right thing. And by dumping long-term partners like ACME instead of working with us to solve the problem, it is unprofitable.

I have three suggestions to improve the process.

1. Add a step between 'fully enabled account' and 'completely disabled account'. Some sort of 'limbo' where ads are not running but the publisher still has read-only access to the web site so they can see their stats.
2. Send publishers an email alert when the fraud filters start seeing something bad, instead of waiting a month and a half and then disabling the account.
3. Open up an authenticated API for automated fetching of AdSense publisher stats. Then publishers could do their own automated analysis and generate their own email alerts on unusual activity.

I remain, for now, a happy AdSense publisher. And if we go another round and I get disabled again, well at least now I know more about what's going on.]]> http://acme.com/updates/archive/173.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/173.html Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:49:59 GMT I have been using Google's AdSense web advertising system since it opened to the public, eight and a half years ago. Aside from one quickly-resolved incident eight years ago, Google and I have been very happy with each other and have made a lot of money for each other.

Two weeks ago I got a form letter from AdSense telling me that my account had been disabled. The letter explained how I could file an appeal, so I did. This morning I got their response to my appeal: denied. That would seem to be the end of my relationship with AdSense.

Other folks dealing with AdSense might be interested in the details, so I'll post them below. But there's really not much, the form letters are nearly devoid of information. This is intentional - the first item in AdSense's Disabled Account FAQ says:

Q. Why was my account disabled? Can you tell me more about the invalid click activity you detected?
A. Because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection system, we're unable to provide our publishers with any information about their account activity, including any web pages, users, or third-party services that might have been involved.

Wikipedia's page on AdSense includes a section of criticism with this paragraph:

According to critics, AdSense is one of the worst publisher programs who really don't care about its publishers. Many cases were reported about the accounts being disabled once a publisher reaches the minimum payout amount of $100. Publishers will only get an automated email which says that their site is a threat to the advertisers and other publishers. The email contains a link to the help forum which is unlikely to get the account reinstated, even if their account was disabled in error. About 99% of affected publishers say that their account has not been reinstated, and they believe that the termination was done in error.

Here's the relevant part of the initial form letter:

Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:43:23 -0000
From: "Google AdSense" <adsense-adclicks-noreply@google.com>
Subject: Google AdSense Account Disabled

Hello,

After reviewing our records, we've determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we've found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google's share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

Here's my appeal, with my responses in italics:

Name:

Jeffrey Poskanzer

Company's name (If applicable):

ACME Laboratories

Example URLs where you've placed your ads:

http://acme.com/ http://acme.com/software/ http://mapper.acme.com/

Date your account was disabled:

15 January 2012

Have you appealed the disabling of this account in the past?

yes

Do you have any other active AdSense accounts?

no

Who are the intended users of your site?

software developers, map users, photographers

From what parts of the world do your users view your site?

all

How are your users accessing the web? (e.g. Internet cafes, home DSL lines, mobile devices, university / office intranets)

no idea

Does your site content include content copied from other sites on the web (not including RSS feeds)?

no

What is the source of your site's content?

myself

How many people are involved with the administration of the site?

just me

How often do you update your site?

daily

Have you ever purchased traffic to your site(s)?

no

Have you ever signed up for services that give users incentives to visit your site/ads? (e.g. auto-surf, pay-to-read, pay-to-click)

no

How do users get to your site? How do you promote your site?

My site is very well known, with links all over the net.

Why do you believe the traffic to your Google ads is valuable to advertisers?

I provide excellent and highly-respected services andsoftware.

Would visitors to your site have any reason to increase your AdSense earnings? If so, why?

no

Have you or your site ever violated the AdSense program policies or Terms & Conditions? If so, how?

In 2003 and 2004 there were a couple of incidents where ads on one of my software projects' pages were considered borderline invalid, because of how users were getting to those pages. We resolved the situation by removing the ads from just those pages. In the eight years since then the Google-ACME relationship has been very happy.

Any relevant information that you believe may explain the invalid click activity we detected:

I have no idea why your detector triggered.

Any data in your site traffic logs or reports that indicate suspicious IP addresses, referrers, or requests:

I took a look and saw nothing unusual. If you give me some hint of what to look for, maybe I could be more helpful.

Here's their acknowledgement of my appeal:

Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:40:52 -0000
From: "Google AdSense" <adsense-adclicks@google.com>
Subject: Re: [#946896951] Invalid Activity Appeal

Hello,

This message confirms that we've received your appeal submission.

We'll get to your appeal as soon as we can, though due to the high volume of emails we receive, it may take us up to a week or more to process it. If you've previously submitted an appeal for this account, you might not receive a response to this or future appeals.

Also, please be aware that appealing the disabling of your AdSense account does not guarantee that it will be reinstated.

And here's today's response to my appeal:

Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:19:47 -0000
From: "Google AdSense" <adsense-adclicks@google.com>
Subject: Re: [#946896951] Invalid Activity Appeal

Hello,

Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you've provided, as well as your continued interest in the AdSense program. However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we're unable to reinstate your AdSense account.

• There's now a NEXRAD map type, showing weather radar.
• Geocoding is now done using Google's service instead of Yahoo!'s, since Google has much wider coverage.

Actually there already was at least one other map that does this, but it only does a planar approximation. My version uses completely accurate spherical geometry, including drawing great circle arcs instead of straight lines.

There are a couple other features of interest to Google Maps authors: it remembers the most recent position/zoom/map-type in a cookie; and it correctly handles lines & regions that cross the International Dateline.]]> http://acme.com/updates/archive/145.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/145.html Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:10:44 GMT Paris Metro map. And it does route-finding! It's very slick.]]> http://acme.com/updates/archive/144.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/144.html Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:10:42 GMT BART schedule.]]> http://acme.com/updates/archive/143.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/143.html Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:37 GMT in JavaScript. Why? People tend to think of JavaScript as a crippled Java, but it's really more like awk on steroids, and not in the bad way that perl went. The version of the language I'm using for this has some non-standard extra objects added for file I/O and system access. With these additions, I think it makes a fairly good general-purpose scripting language, and I wrote the web server to illustrate the point. Perhaps someday if the I/O extensions become standardized, general use of JavaScript will catch on.]]> http://acme.com/updates/archive/142.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/142.html Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:50:39 GMT The mail filtering pages got slashdotted yesterday. The server handled the load pretty well, except that there were a lot of packet collisions on the two-foot ethernet segment between the server and the DSL box.]]> http://acme.com/updates/archive/141.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/141.html Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:24 GMT ipizer, a filter to improve sendmail log files so they are easier to analyze.]]> http://acme.com/updates/archive/140.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/140.html Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:19 GMT Had a two-hour power outage this evening. The server stayed up, on UPS. My workstation lasted less than an hour on its smaller UPS, so I read a book while waiting. http://acme.com/updates/archive/139.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/139.html Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:07 GMT ACME Labs Mail Filtering Tutorial is now open to the public.]]> http://acme.com/updates/archive/138.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/138.html Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:00 GMT photos. This uploads the picture to smugmug if necessary, and then redirects you there. You can also order stuff besides prints, such as t-shirts, coffee mugs, and jigsaw puzzles.]]> http://acme.com/updates/archive/137.html http://acme.com/updates/archive/137.html Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:22:48 GMT xmlrpc.]]>