Jen has written some great advice for those who are suspended from the Adsense program:
‘First, don’t claim that you are innocent – they know why you were suspended, and you will have a better shot if you confess your sins and promise to be a law abiding AdSense publisher. If they know you made a habit of clicking an ad or two every single morning, thinking they would never notice the odd click here and there, trying to deny it will get you nowhere.
And if you happen to get suspended and you really are innocent? Offer to provide any raw logs to aid in their investigation, although it may take a couple of tries once you are suspended to get them to respond about it….’
Great advice (as is the rest of her post) which I echo. The long and short of dealing with the Adsense team in my experience is to be as calm, polite and friendly, honest and accommodating as possible. Remember they have ALOT of publishers to deal with, they tend not to work weekends (or not all of them do) and they want you to make money from Adsense (because if you do they do).
Of course if you’re clicking your own ads or doing something dishonest you’ll be caught eventually (and deserve to be).
*Removes nodding bird from mouse button*
It beats me why so many people think that bluster and bravado are going to achieve anything.
An honest and polite approach is far more likely to produce a win/win outcome than launching a vitriolic attack on someone to try and camouflage your own stupidity.
He-he.. That’s very funny Alex :)
One thing I’ve always wondered is what to do if there is an advert that appears on your website that you are genuinely interested in?
My best answer is having to type the URL into the browser. Any other suggestions?
Dominic, get the Adsense preview tool [by google]. It allows you to right click a page [even your own] and view the ads from that page and then you can click on those ones without fear of penalty. It is good for optimizing your pages and selecting ads you’d like to filter.
To the original question, if all else fails: Incorporate a company and reapply for a new Adsense account and then put the ads back onto your sites from the new account. In extreme cases you may need to transfer your domain names.
I do the same thing Dominic,
I’ll type the URL into my browser and try to search around for whatever they were advertising, or, you could always go to the Digital Point AdSense Sandbox, type in your URL and hope you get the same ad…
that’s all I’ve got :D
I was suspended for about a day because I had stuck my code in a server side included header file that was inadvertently displaying my code on an error page. They sent me a warning email and I didn’t get it because, get this…Gmail classified it as spam. So, moral to my story is to make sure that Adsense is whitelisted in your email program. Of course, if you’re being suspended for fraudulent clicks you probably won’t get a warning email.
As far as that whole click thing goes, I very occasionally get an ad on The Barter Blog for a Yahoo Group related to barter. The URL listed on the ad is just “Yahoo.com”, so that is pretty much useless and the ad is so intermittent that it may only come up once in 50 impressions. Obviously if it’s a group I don’t belong to, it’s something I would join in a flash. Frankly as an advertiser I’d be a little miffed that a publisher with a clear interest in my product was prohibited from visiting my site to make a legitimate purchase. How hard is it to distinguish 1 click from multiple clicks to the same ad?
I also do the same type the url in the browser window and look at advertisers.