Adsense Ads Took Over My Website...or Why Did My Blog Disappear?

It's time this situation was addressed...long past time actually. I guess I've been a little lax lately. Each week we see at least a couple of publishers in the forum asking why their website or blogs have disappeared, and been replaced with a page full of adsense ads. Mostly, these are new publishers who assume that because they've purchased a domain name for their site or blog, they should use Adsense for Domains.

Wrong!

Why? Well, because Adsense for Domains is only for "undeveloped" domains. An undeveloped domain is one that doesn't contain a website or a blog...basically, it is nothing more than a purchased domain name. You would only use Adsense for Domains if you don't have hosting for a website, and don't have a blog to redirect your domain name to.

For any website or blog with actual contents on it, you must choose Adsense for Content, not Adsense for Domains.

Adsense for Content is for any regular (not mobile) website, or any type of blog (again, not a mobile enabled site). So it doesn't matter if you are using a free blog like Blogger.com, or a self-hosted wordpress blog (not a free wordpress blog) - you still would choose Adsense for Content, even if your Blogger or Wordpress blog has it's own domain name.

If you've already set-up Adsense for Domains and can't find your website any longer, you'll need to follow the instructions on the Adsense Help Center page to remove your site from Adsense for Domains (please read the instruction page carefully).

Once you've completed the restoration of your domain settings, your website will be available again. At that point, you can sign in to your Adsense account and then select "Adsense for Content" to set up your ads.

For anyone just starting out: please read the product instructions before you select the product you want to use. The descriptions contain information on where to use these products, as well as the individual program policies for each of the different Adsense Products.

Adsense, Blogger, Gmail and Google - Disabled Accounts

In recent months we've seen a couple of round of wholesale account removals by Google. Their automatic spam procedures have nuked hundreds (possibly thousands) of accounts; some rightfully so, and some in error.

How it works isn't something I'm going to go through in-depth, but if you really want to understand how this happens, read this article by one of Blogger's most prolific Top Contributors. He explains how the spam detection system works, and why some ordinary blogs and/or accounts get caught in the filter. He also explains how to get your account back, but - the final review is...the final review. If your account is still deemed as spam and not restored, it will be because humans have reviewed it manually and still found it meets the qualifications for spam.

When you login to your Google, Gmail or Blogger account and see this:"Your account has been disabled" you need to click on the "contact us" link provided. That should take you to a page explaining that your Google account has been disabled. Read the information on the page, and follow the instructions - follow the instructions precisely. In other words, review the Terms of Service and be absolutely certain your account(s) follow those terms before you submit any other form. There is a contact form at the end of the page - if your account meets the terms, use the contact form.

If you were caught in the spam filter accidentally, there's a pretty good chance you will have your account restored.

On the other hand, if your blog contained any of the things Blogger considers outside of their policy, or is seen as spam, you won't get your blog(s) back, and you probably won't get your Google account back either.

Some of the things considered to fall outside of the terms of use on Blogger/Google are also some of things Adsense considers to be unsuitable for displaying ads, so if you use Blogger and Adsense, then you need to pay attention to this. If your blog contains the following type of content - you may be caught in the next round of Google nukes.

• Affiliate marketing.
• Content created with scripts and programs, rather than by hand
• Auto-generated contents
• Content or links referencing GPT, PTC, PTS, 'Make money from home', 'Make money fast', or other referral-based activities
• Link Farms
• Content scraped from other sources, duplicate contents
• Copyright Infringement
• Large blogs with multiple, unfocused / unrelated subjects.
• Links to Illegal Downloads / Streaming / Torrents.

An explanation of Blogger's Content Policy is found here: Blogger Content Policy

If your blog contains these types of content, you better start cleaning them up now. Sooner or later, Blogger or Adsense, or even Google will remove your accounts if you don't.

WHY LOSING YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT CAUSES BIGGER PROBLEMS

Losing a Blogger account usually means...well, you lose your blog. Losing an Adsense account means you can't monetize with Adsense any longer, but you might still have your blog or other Google Services. Losing your Google Account is a much larger problem.

A Google Account is like a giant umbrella over all of your other services provided by Google. The Google Account login allows you to login to any Google service you've signed up for - it's much like the key to the filing cabinet. Without it, you can't get any of the filing drawers to open.

If you lose your blogger account, and only your blogger account, you may still have access to your other Google services.

If you lose your Google Account, you literally lose access to any other services you had under that umbrella. This is important - so pay attention. This is not just "when Google disables your account". The same thing occurs if YOU delete your own Google account.

We see this frequently in the Adsense forums. Someone decides they want a new Google Account (for whatever reason) - to use a different name, or to only use some of the products, or just to organize their accounts a little better.

The first thing they do is go "delete" their Google Account.

Then they wonder why they can't access any of their other Google services. They can't, because by deleting the Google Account, they've just thrown away the key to the cabinet. Without the Google account, you now have no access to anything else under that umbrella.

If you plan to move your blogs, or gmail or adsense account (or any other Google service) to a new account, you need to request help in the appropriate help forum BEFORE you delete your old Google Account.

• Adsense Help Forum
• Blogger Help Forum
• Gmail Help Forum
• All Other Help Forums

Optimizing Ad Placements

In recent months Adsense has done a complete overhaul of the Help Center files. While I haven't found all of these changes to be helpful, in some cases they might be useful for newbies.

The Newbie Central section has changed quite a bit, but it highlights some of the most important things newbies should know, and understand before getting the ads onto their sites.  The introductory page gives you a short list of the places where you should start - just click the picture or link on their introduction page (linked)  and start learning.

Adsense has been adding some other basic help pages for those just beginning with Adsense. Two of these useful sections are the Ad Placement Optimizers: the One-Click Optimizer, and the Optimization Lab (which is not just for newbies).

One-Click Ad Optimizer

The one click optimizer offers suggestions for ad placement for a variety of site types: news sites, classified sites, game sites, forums and blogs. Possibly because these are the types of sites we most frequently see questions about, though most of us helping in the forums don't seem to use these different types of sites.

Before creating these optimizers, Adsense spends a fair bit of time learning what works well for certain types of sites - so there is some research behind these ad placement suggestions. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they will work for your site, it means they should. Every site is different, and sometimes the best ad placements for your own site might not be the same as what they've suggested. Placements that work will depend on your site layout, and your contents, as well as your visitors. If you already have a visitor base, then you need to pay attention to what your visitors want.

If your site is fairly new, then it might be a good idea to check out the optimizers and see how your current ad placement lines up with what Adsense says is effective. You may want to try some of their suggestions on different pages of your site. If you decide to do this, then make sure you create channels for these new ad placements so you can track their effectiveness yourself.

The Optimization Lab

The Optimization Lab has more help for getting the most out of your ads. There are simple instructions on how to increase your CTR and increase the CPC on your websites, however, if you are a newbie you will also need to pay close attention to the policies.

One of the possible ways to increase the CTR is to wrap your text around an ad unit. The Adsense Optimzation Lab gives instructions in the form of a div code to do this, but keep in mind that if you implement this, you really need to have more than "5" pixels of space between the ad and your text. This is especially true if you are using a lot of images close to the ad placement, or if you are using text ads with no borders in your text area. The ad unit must NOT be mistaken for part of your text.

What it doesn't give you are the instructions for using that div code everywhere. Basic websites built with html can put their ad codes within their text areas, usually without much problem. That allows them to use just this div code supplied by Adsense to set the ad to the right or left side within their text. But most blogs will not not accept the adsense code within the text areas - at least blogger will not. And some wordpress blogs may not either.

In order to do this, you'll need to parse the adsense code for blogger (do a web search - lots of blogs have already written about this). This parsed adsense code is then placed in between the two div codes given by Adsense and inserted into the correct spot in your blog's TEMPLATE, not in the text area.

What happens then is that the ad will display in that spot on each post you have without you having to place the code each time.

Also be aware that if you have your blogs set to display more than one post on a page, you will not be able toplace  ad units in your sidebar (use link units instead), header or footer areas because each of your first 3 posts will already have an ad in it, and you are only allowed to display 3 ad units.

If you normally display more than 3 posts on a page, also do not use this method for displaying your ads. If you have 5 posts on a page, this code will try to display 5 ads - one in each post. Adsense will then only display one public service ad, and no other ads.

This method of inserting the code into the template is really only good if you have your blog set to display one or two posts per page, but it will work fine for static websites (ie: sites that are all individual pages, rather than a blog with multiple posts on a page).

There are other things in the optimization lab you might want to look at - and a few to be careful about.

In the "Boost Impressions" section one of the things they list is to use Adwords to increase site traffic. Please, please, please do NOT run over to Adwords and start buying ads to increase your traffic.

Adsense and Adwords used together can cause publishers a lot of grief. Most new publishers signing on at Adwords have NOT taken the time to understand how these work together, and what you need to do to MAKE it work. If you are considering using Adwords to drive traffic directly to a page loaded with Adsense ads, then forget doing that. The purpose of Adwords isn't to get people to go click on your ads. It's purpose is to advertise your SITE, PRODUCT (which is NOT adsense), or SERVICE.

The page that your Adwords ad leads to must meet certain quality guidelines (available at adwords), and your website must also meet certain quality guidelines...if it doesn't, you can lose both your accounts. As well, your ad itself must not be misleading. If your ad says "get a free laptop" it better lead to a page where someone gets a free laptop. So how many free laptops have you got to give away? Oh...none? Well then that ad is misleading. Change the wording so it says "sign up to get a free laptop", in which case the page it leads to has to have a spot for someone to signup for a free laptop.

There are many misleading advertisements that end up on our websites as publishers. I don't know about the rest of you, but I report these ads when I find them, and so do many of my readers. If my readers click an ad for a free calendar template, it's because that's what they're looking for and if the click doesn't take them to a page with a free calendar template they're gonna complain.

Make sure well before you sign up for Adwords that you understand all the requirements from both the Adsense side and the Adwords side, otherwise you may be risking your account.

Invalid Clicks? How, Where, Why?

An excellent place for most new publishers to begin understanding policy and issues that may cause invalid clicks is the "AdSense Policies: A Beginner's Guide" page in the AdSense Help Center, and well worth taking the time to read for some established publishers. You might be surprised at some of what you'll find on this page.

One of the first things AdSense mentions in the "Clicks and Impressions" section is that they monitor these very carefully. There's  an unspoken idea there, and if you think about it long enough you might understand what that hidden message is.

If AdSense is monitoring clicks and impressions "very carefully", it's probably a good idea for you to also monitor these yourself - "very carefully".

Monitoring the activity on your website or blog is one of the ways you can help to head off a lot of ad clicks that AdSense may consider to be invalid. You monitor site activity using Google Analytics, and any third-party site analyzer that records IP addresses, visitor activity, and times, and if you pay for webhosting, most hosts will have some sort of server logs for your site. Now is the time to familiarize yourself with some of these - simply do a web search for website statistics or counters and read through some of those available. Select one that fits your needs and learn how it works, and put the necessary codes on your site. Keep copies of logs or statistics, because these will be useful in analyzing your site and monitoring your traffic.

When you analyze your stats there are things you should watch for:

•  one visitor clicking multiple ads in one visit (1 or 2 ads, probably okay. 7-10 or more ads, probably not okay but don't panic, just report it - 30+ ads clicked by one person...start panicing and remove your website from the allowed sites list, also report the IP addresses and times to adsense)
• many visits coming from a single IP address. This can cause problems with Adsense if those visitors are also clicking ads.
• many visits coming from the same referrer and you don't know why. Check out the referrer and find out why the visitors are originating from that site. Someone posted your link to a blog or group, that's probably okay depending on the purpose of the group. Someone posting your link to a link farm or link exchange - not okay. Contact the site and get them to remove your link.
• visitors coming from your own IP address and clicking ads. Definitely not okay. Even if it isn't YOU, it is someone in your household. Or,  if you use a wi-fi connection and don't lock it down, it could be anyone close enough to logon to the internet using your IP. Make sure you password-protect your wi-fi logon, and don't share it with anyone. You may also want to check your connections even if you are using cable or dial-up. We ran into a situation where a neighbour had cut another neighbour's cable near the pole and inserted a splitter box. The neighbour was then able to use the cable connection belonging to someone else without paying for the services...and causing the other neighbour to have enormous internet bills.

If you discover anything you find suspicious or unreasonable on your stats, then you will want consider reporting this instance to AdSense. Please, please don't go reporting single unidentified click - that's not what we're talking about here. And you don't need to report every single click you aren't certain about. If you pay attention to your site activity, you'll soon be able to recognize things that are unusual or out of the normal ranges of your site activity.

You can report these using the Invalid or suspicious activity form, found on this page in the Adsense help center.

On the "AdSense policies: a beginner's guide" page you'll also note a small paragraph about traffic: "Be aware of how your site is promoted". Read it carefully, and follow the links in that paragraph because you may find that reading will save you a great deal of grief.

While AdSense doesn't tell you that you can't promote your site, there are certain types of promotional opportunities that AdSense frowns upon - things like traffic exchanges and link farms whose sole purpose is to send people to your site to register impressions or clicks. If you are planning to buy any sort of advertising to grow your site, you'll need to be very careful about what you buy, where you buy it, and what your purpose is for purchasing it.

If you are buying "traffic" ONLY to get your AdSense ads seen and perhaps clicked, then that's a very bad idea. For the most part, you will probably pay more for the advertising needed to do that than you would get in return by way of clicks. If you are purchasing advertising because your site has a product or service you want to promote (ie: that service or product should certainly not be AdSense, nor should it be any sort of illegal product) then purchasing advertising might be of some value to you outside of AdSense.

In any case, garnering traffic through purchases means the advertiser (in this case you if you are buying traffic/ads) who also uses AdSense must following the Google landing page quality guidelines given to AdWords advertisers, even though you may not be purchasing your advertising through AdWords. These guidelines include a quality component that says landing pages (ie: the page your advertisement leads to on your site) must contain:

• original and relevant content (so, don't advertise free websites if you aren't indeed giving away free websites on your site/page and don't have content copied from other sites or RSS feeds)
• AdSense lists things like making sure the purpose of your site is clear to visitors, and that your content is not copied from other sites.
• transparency - the user should be able to find out about your company or website easily (about us page) or be able to contact you easily (contact info), you should have a clear privacy policy, your site should not download anything automatically to any user or visitor, if you have a "download" button or link the user should know what they're downloading (clearly stated on the page) and the download link should begin a download, not route them to multiple other pages.
•  navigability - the navigation should be clearly displayed on your page and should be simple for visitors to find; all the links should work and go to the correct page.

The landing page guidelines are quite clear on the fact that originality is what they expect - "relevance and originality are two characteristics that define high-quality site content." I don't think they can be any clearer than that. Users should easily find what your advertisement states and they should be able to find that on your landing page, and you should not have content that is not original (created by you).

There are many other valuable hints on landing page quality for AdSense publishers who wish to use advertising to promote their websites: such things as browser behaviours, collection of personal information; using too many popups, popunders, floating box elements and the like; fast loading pages, portal or doorway pages, etc.

Here's where things may take a little twist. How does all of the above apply to publishers who are disabled for invalid activity? Almost any violation of policies, including those above, could widely be construed as invalid activity. If you are not in compliance with all policies that AdSense and Webmaster Guidelines list (and the Landing Page Quality Guidelines), then any earnings you accrue could be considered invalid. In otherwords, clicks on AdSense ads on pages that are not in compliance with policy could possibly be listed as invalid clicks.

Having an account disabled for invalid clicks doesn't necessarily mean AdSense thinks you've clicked your own ads - of course you may have, in which case you'd already know that you did. But for those publisher's who have no idea what these invalid clicks are (or where they came from), the email they receive is a rude awakening, and often comes much too late. Even if they are able to discover the cause, the chances of getting the AdSense account re-instated are almost nil.

Minor policy violations (like no privacy policy, or inadvertently placing an ad too close to content) may receive a warning notice, however, this warning should be taken very seriously.

Publishers should not only correct the issues listed by Adsense in the warning notice (throughout their entire site, not just on the page given as a reference), but should very carefully review their sites to ensure there are no other issues. Besides carefully studying the AdSense Program Policies and Webmaster Guidelines, if you have purchased traffic or signed up for free traffic, you'll want to consider the quality of that traffic as well. When it comes to traffic, all is not equal. Traffic from sources unacceptable to AdSense is worse than no traffic at all and can also lead to invalid clicks.

These are only a few of the possible causes for invalid clicks, but some that AdSense Publishers can exercise some control over.

AdSense's Unacceptable Content Rejection - What is it?

It seems like this is the question everyone's asking right now. There are more and more of these rejection questions showing up in the AdSense Help forums, and most people seem uncertain about what this rejection means. For the most part,  Adsense isn't all that clear about what to do in order to correct this, and won't spell out precisely what the issue is.

In some cases, the unacceptable content is easy to spot when you compare the person's website against the AdSense Program Policies, but it isn't always as simple as that - particularly when English is not the publisher's native language.

Some of the reasons for unacceptable site content that we've been able to come up with in the forums are as follows:

1. - content that doesn't meet adsense policy (read the policies here: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182)
2. - content that doesn't meet the webmaster guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769) Although the Webmaster Guidelines are listed as "guidelines", AdSense publishers are required to follow these guidelines, making them as important as the Adsense Program Policies. When you are applying to become a publisher, or when you are a publisher, the Webmaster Guidelines are no longer guidelines - they are a requirement, so you'll need to consider these as rules you must follow.
3. - content that isn't original (articles and content you didn't write). Since the inception of "Caffeine", AdSense has been systematically disabling blogs and websites with copied content, auto-written contents, contents of little to no value (re-purposed content from other websites), written content that doesn't make sense or reads as gibberish, and has been rejecting blogs and websites of this nature in the last few months. If you apply with a blog or website with contents such as this, be prepared to receive a rejection notice. What you need is original content that you've created yourself.
4. - no content, or very little content. AdSense requires each blog or website to contain sufficient content. If you have a blog with one or two posts, that's not going to be good enough for AdSense to approve. If your website has only one page, then you'll probably get rejected, unless it's a very big place with a LOT of original content.  If you apply with a site that has "no content", then your "content" is non-existent, which makes it unacceptable content.
5. - blank pages in your website. AdSense doesn't want to see your proposed website, or a website under development. They want your website to be complete, and easy to navigate. It shouldn't have a redirect for the domain URL (unless you've used a 301 redirect), it shouldn't have a frame on the URL that calls the website from another URL (it needs to be a direct URL), it shouldn't have links that don't work or are broken, and it shouldn't have links that lead to blank pages with no content, or with only "ipsum lorem" text. That's the latin text you often see on template pages when you purchase a template or get a free site template. That text is nothing but gibberish - it's meant as a place holder, and you need to replace that with your own text.
6. - copyright infringements (images or other contents you don't have permission to use). Adsense expects it's publishers to "go the extra mile" and create their own unique contents, including images. If you can't create your own images to use with your text (websites and blogs need text, not JUST images or videos), then they expect you to get permission from the image owner BEFORE you use the images, and you'll need to give credit to the image owner. Images specifically marked as being in the public domain don't require permission for use, but you do still need to have a site with mostly original contents, so using a site full of public domain images and nothing else is likely to get a rejection.
7. - a website that isn't six months old and doesn't have six months worth of original content. Adsense requires sites from many countries to be six months old before getting approval, and although we don't have a list of specific countries to point to, it appears that there are many more countries AdSense has added this requirement for.

While there may still be other reasons for unacceptable content, these are the most common ones we've come across. It's up to each publisher to ensure their content follows the guidelines and policies set out by AdSense and Webmaster Guidelines so if you receive this rejection, you'll need to spend some time going through your website or blog and digging through your content to find the areas you'll need to amend, remove, or add to.

If you have taken the time to study your site and the policies and still can't figure out what's wrong, then you can ask in the AdSense Help Forum to see if someone else can see the issues at hand, but it's really the publisher's responsibility to at least try to figure out the problems first. Help is always available, but learning how to decipher your site's problems will help you keep your account in good standing in the future.