I just received another sad letter from a person who had the “dreaded letter” from Google. Their AdSense account had been terminated! To add insult to injury, according to Google’s terms of service, any money owed at that point will NOT be paid; it is returned to the advertisers. Don’t let it happen to you! Clicking your own links is not the only way to get banned. Also, be careful which “friends” you shoe your sites to. You don’t want any unauthorized help!

Call me paranoid, but Google’s reach is so broad that I am afraid they could make the connection if those friends began clicking my ads. Who knows…but I am not taking any chances! If you violate “minor” rules, they may be nice and just warn you. Or they will just hit the ban button depending I think on the mood of the reviewer at the time.

Make sure you read the rules and follow them! Another person asked me if the way they used pictures near their ads violated rules. If it was obvious to me it was a rules violation; imagine what the Google reviewer would think!

One more example: A person contacted me about their site which was doing poorly with respect to traffic. I took one look and told the owner that the varied content would be seen by the search engines as “spam”. Google is very clear; sites with no real intent of providing a quality experience for visitors are not welcome in the AdSense program. Several weeks later, the person wrote back; they had received “the letter”.

I don’t know if what I saw is what got them banned or not; but it sure did not help. Even though we do create sites with the intent of earning AdSense income, everyone must remember that quality content is a vital component of AdSense Success. …and follow those AdSense rules!

Tweet This Post

Sometimes we all get so caught up in the site creation process, we neglect the very basics of the AdSense setup.

Here is a short list of things you should be doing within your AdSense account.

1. Make SURE you specify in your account the URL’s you approve of for using your AdSense code (this is found in “setup” and “allowed sites”). These will be all the sites you own of course. Here’s what can go wrong if you don’t do this: Someone could copy your page code (it happens all the time) and make their site with it. The code, of course, contains your account’s Adsense code. You do NOT want your code to be active out on other sites like that. There is no telling what types of problems that could create for you. Plus, a competitor could simply copy your code, make a page to put it on, and start clicking like crazy on the ads trying to get you banned! …not likely, but it is possible.

2. Every single ad unit you create should have its own channel. If you don’t do this, and you have 3 ad units on one page, there is no way to know which units are producing well! It makes it impossible to test which units are getting the best clicks.

3. Lastly, when choosing content ad units, do not select the default (images or text) choice. Select either for images or text for that channel. Again, if you use the default choice, you will not know if images or text do better for your niche. Run an ad as text for a while, record the results, and then run an image ad in the same location and test its results. Test, Test Test!

Tweet This Post