Banned From Google & No Support in Sight

A couple of days ago we were notified by Google that our AdSense account was disabled for reasons unknown. What? How is this possible. Then I thought, well this is no good because I have never heard of anyone getting reinstated after this, even after appealing. I get another email a few hours later on my personal Gmail account from AdSense telling me that it was also disabled. The same message. Are you kidding me?

In order to have an AdSense or YouTube account you need to have a Gmail account. We created one for the business that we can all access. Google want’s a real person associated with accounts so I put my name down as the point of contact. When we signed up for AdSense, I was point of contact but included our business information. I have a personal Gmail account and AdSense associated with it for YouTube videos. I know that you cannot have more that one AdSense account. I don’t, I have my AdSense account and then there is an AdSense account in the business name with me as the point of contact.

We don’t receive much money from AdSense but it’s required to be a YouTube partner. We are (or were) trying to grow our YouTube subscriptions, create more original videos and use YouTube to host everything. Well when our AdSense account was disabled we received another email from YouTube/ This time informing us that we are not partners anymore because of not having an active AdSense account. So what is the point for us to use YouTube anymore? There is none.

Let’s continue with AdSense and what I think happened. We have been getting quite a bit of “ghost” traffic to our website. This traffic is not coming from the same IP addresses and we have been unsuccessful in tracking it down even using multiple analytic programs like Google Analytics, Alexa, Quantcast and Compete. We also use CloudFlare, which helps with security by blocking DDOS attacks along with bad IP addresses. If they are getting to our site, we are assuming they are legit traffic. I noticed in AdSense that our final earnings were not matching the estimated earnings and it said it was because of invalid clicks. Invalid clicks are when the owner of the site is clicking on ads themselves, telling people to click on ads or making people click on ads to continue, etc.

We don’t do that here. We are trying to run a legit business and AdSense isn’t a big money maker for us. I spent nine months trying to get our site included into Google News. Now that we are in Google News, we would never jeopardize that relationship. It makes no sense what-so-ever. I tried contacting Google about these invalid clicks and if it’s being caused by this “ghost” traffic to see if they have a solution for this because I know we are not the only people in the world that this has happened to and if anyone had a solution, it would be Google.

But you can’t contact Google. They tell you to post your issues in the Google product forum. So I did that and no one was able to help me out because they are just publishers like us and don’t have access to or work at Google. No one from Google posted in the thread. Look I understand that Google is huge and is contacted 10’s of thousands of times a day for support but when you are accusing people of invalid clicks or click fraud you would think they would let you talk to someone. Especially after having an account for a 1.5 years with no issues.

I have yet to hear back from the business account appeal but was quickly denied my appeal with my personal account. This happening and the fact I’m writing about it makes me nervous that we might lose other products we use with Google like; our Google News listing and our Google Apps account along with all of our email. I tried reaching out to Google’s public relation department to see if they wanted to make a statement but have yet to hear from them.