Keeping Your AdSense Account in Good Standing

Say what you will about “Big Brother” or other nicknames floating around about Google. The fact is, I call, someone answers the phone who can help me, unlike my experience with other companies in search.

Google AdSense is often a hot topic and recently the “AdSense Advisor” dropped in over at Webmaster World and gave some advice … that was quite generic. So, I picked up the phone and called Google. Only one transfer brought me where I wanted to be, and exactly 18 minutes later all of my questions were answered great detail.

Excellent.

Of course, what everyone always wants to know is what can you do to keep your AdSense account in good standing because you hear all these nightmare stories of people getting their accounts shut down for “no reason” and losing a lot of money. And, of course, on June 1st Google booted a lot of MFA (Made for AdSense) publishers. No one wants that either.

But right up there on the list of what AdSense publishers don’t want to happen is not getting advice such as:

• Don’t click on your own ads.
• Don’t ask others to click on your own ads.
• Don’t use popups on pages that have AdSense.
• Don’t cloak.
• Respect Google’s Trademarks.

Every publisher will tell you that they already know all that, and most of what is published on keeping your AdSense account clean is pretty much common sense. In my phone conversation, the following was suggested:

1. Log into your account at least once per week and look at trends. If you notice something really off, such as the same amount of traffic came to your site during the week but your AdSense earnings were 10x what they should be. That could be a problem. Contacting Google first is a good step.
2. Learn how to read analytics
3. If you notice “abnormalities” in your account look for the same IP address coming to your site over and over. That could be the source of the fraud. You may consider blocking that IP address from your site.
4. Watch the “company that you keep” and where your traffic comes from. Cheap traffic can be “dirty” and cause problems.

Note: I have found that Google Analytics isn’t enough. I prefer to read the raw log. More info coming shortly how to do that and what to use.

If you do get your account disabled, there is a Disabled Account FAQ which is quite good.

Here is a brief summary:

• Google’s main concern is to protect their AdWords advertisers. They are the ones paying Google and Google is paying you. Do you understand the “loyalty line” now? If they determine there is a problem, your account will get suspended.
• Google is willing to work with you to reinstate your account if the invalid clicks were not caused by you or your employees.
• If your account is disabled and your appeal is denied you cannot open another account, you are done. Period.
• The balance in your account will be returned to the advertisers affected by the invalid clicks. You will NOT be receiving a check.
• Another AdSense publisher may place their code on your site, but keep in mind they must abide by the same Terms of Use.

From my testing, YPN and other content networks don’t come close to the good payouts Google gives out, even with the reduction of what they were (in terms of per click revenue) two years ago.