How Google Adsense Sucks…
Ok,
So over a year ago I signed up for Google’s Adsense and was making a few bucks a month. Nothing to write home about but enough to pay some hosting costs. A couple of months ago, I took on some more sites to host and in exchange asked them to display my google ads. The clickthroughs were nice and it seemed as if these sites were very targetted to the types of ads the advertisers wanted to show…
Then I get the email from Google saying invalid clicks had been generated and my account was cancelled. Just before they were to pay me some decent money. The sad thing is that all of the page clicks were valid clicks from people going to the sites and I have the server logs to back it up.
I sense a bit more of a conspiracy here. Google got paid for all those clickthroughs from the advertiser, and because my rates jumped so quickly, google assumed they had to be fraudulent or didn’t want to pay so they just canceled my account. From a simple google search, it doesn’t look like I’m alone. Optimize your site for Google Adsense and increase your clickthroughs and google will cancel your account…
There is something worse though in Google’s model… The deliberate social hack to get someone else’s google adsense account banned. Simple email to them, a robot script to click links repeatedly, or worst and you can cancel someones main income stream instantly. But google doesn’t suffer, because they must be collecting from the advertiser.
It seems that Google feels the need to screw the little guy but not disclose the the advertiser that they paid for “fraudulent” clicks. If they were truely fradulent, wouldn’t google give you a chance to refute the claim??? Or notify the advertiser? Seems like the real story here is google wants to weed out the high click through sites and maximize their profitability.
The bottom line is Google gives you no chance to reactivate your account, and after further investigation, I won’t go back to adsense nor display an adsense ad ever again on any of my sites. Anyone that doesn’t back up their claims of fraudulent clicks shouldn’t be trusted.
Filed under: News
That is so true ! Google is screwing people big time. But rejoice because an international search engine is coming up early 2006 and first of all this new search engine will have a system that will stop click fraud.
The affiates will know exactly how much they are going to get and the percentage is very high.
I believe Google is going to loose a lot of money in 2006.
Did you know that Click Defense Inc is suing Google for clcik fraud for more than 5 millions dollars ?
Jenny
Join the fight against Google Adsense http://www.Google-Adsense-Sucks.com
the exact same thing happend to me. we set it up, got a bunch of clicks, and when they were supposed to make the first payment they cancelled with no reasoning. shady.
Google screwed my site over too, I invested some money in advertising and got way more traffic, google disabled my account and took the money that I earned. they said I was clicking my own banners over and over, when I tried to contact them and explain to them that I didn’t cheat..no response…
Subject: Petition to get our money from Google going well - PLEASE JOIN US!
We are having great success with out petition to either get our
Adsense accounts back online, or to get enough names to present a
petition to Google to stop its poor business practices.
Please go to:
http://www.noodleware.com/adsense/
and sign the petition. As of today over 700 former Adsense affiliates
have signed on - and this is only in a few weeks!
- If you are still playing click exchanges with someone, you will lose
your Adsense account. Or if it’s just been shut down with no
explaination, then it’s time to take action.
Peace!
–
Thank you,
Rick Horvath
President - Noodleware Software Co.
Custom Designed Web Sites to fit any budget
E-Commerce Solutions
http://www.noodleware.com
Same thing happend to me, right before my first $100 payment was to be sent out. Obviously I am not going to cheat, its google, they know your ip address, their not stupid, why would I be?
My account just got cancelled for invalid clicks. I’ve never clicked on my own ads, and none of my friends know about my website, so how is this possible?
IMHO Google are crooks.
Mine is closed to.
Afther a year
Last months i didn’t get a payout. I didnt know why…
Afther 3 months i’m getting a letter my account is cancelled.
Why they waited 3 months? Just to rease my money and then to shut down?
Adsense sucks
http://www.google-adsense-sucks.com/
[…] Google screws another site over! […]
“Your AdSense account was found to be related to an account previously
disabled for invalid click activity and we have therefore disabled your
account.” .. is what Google told me as reason for stealing USD 170. Read well: Its not even ME clicking on my Ads, my account is “related” to somebody formerly doing fraud with Adsense! They didn’t tell me if they are talking about my grandma, my neighbours cat or father christmas. Was exactly in the moment when they had to send the fist check.
The same story you can find all over the the web. Thousands of 100-200 USD frauds by Google Adsense. They don’t bother to answer your mails. As I am no US citizen I can’t sew them. But I complained online at silcon Valleys Better Business Buero:
http://www.bbbsilicon.org/gccomplaint.html
There are lots of files already about google, you should do this too!
We have a medium size customer base in Mexico and started enabling adsense in several websites last year. Some of them were sponsored with the hope to pay expenses form Google adsense. 5 days ago just before my first payment above 100 USD I received a cancelation for my Adsense account and removed it. I think this company sucks they dont even answer the emails.. they are crooks, how in the world they presume to be so valuable in NASDAQ with a poor business model and customer service.. Google stink
Hi, Both my wife and I came across google adsense only in the last week of feb 2006. We purchased some extra targeted traffic for our sites and there was a fantastic response.
We had both our adsense a/cs closed in the last 24 hours. I had $162 in mine and $111 in my wifes.
Very annoying.
I have emailed them and will call and write if no reply received.
Rgds,
Niall
Yes, it happened to me too.
After I was almost ready to receive my first payment they just closed my account for invalid clicks.
No invitation to click on the banner was on my site. Maybe it was just because I have a community of volleyball players and they are used to click on new things to discover what’s going on?
I had over 3000 impressions a day.
When I was earning 76 dollars (3 dollars a day, so not so much money) they just closed it!!!
And it happen to a collegue of mine too. Without any reason.
I tried the adsense (nonsense) thing.
My travel site can be found in the top 10 results of every search engine out there.
I decided it was time to advertise since my site gets over 30,000 hits per day.
1. I made a lot of money after 1 month exactly.
2. I received a notice in my P.O. box with the PIN number required to receive my money.
3. The very next day after I entered my PIN number I received the same auto e-mail that I was disabled for invalid clicks.
4. I wrote many letters. No response from them, no phone to contact, and no money.
I wonder how many of all clicks on my site were considered valid by Google?
Even though I don’t have time to click my own links due to site development They say they will give it all back to advertisers.
If they could actually track invalid clicks then they should be able to track valid clicks.
I should at least receive my portion of ’so - called valid clicks’ and Google get’s their portion of valid clicks also.
Wouldn’t you think that?
How much do you want to bet where the money really went?
I now refer to them as Google ‘NonSense’.
I’d like to hear more about this international search engine that is going to stop click fraud.
it happened to us to. We had traffic coming in from adbrite.com and ADVERTISEMENT was clearly stated on our websites. Yet 1100.00 dollar later and $700.00 pending google claimed we clicked our own ads.
The letter came. Googles oh so Holier than thou reply of “we know whats best for you” fraudulent clicks were made. It wasn’t true though. We thought alot of google before this happened and now they do not rate with us whatsoever.
I will say this, there are other sites better than google that have been around much longer Yahoo for one. We do not need google and never will.
[…] I came across Patrick Stuart’s blog where he describes his own experience of having his account cancelled. According to the post, his account was cancelled on the basis that several of the ad clicks on his site were “fraudulent.” Google only reported this to him just prior to his first payout. His comments section is overflowing with complaints from other users facing the same situation. Naturally, he was upset, because apparently he has the server log files to prove the legitimacy of all the ad clicks. Joel Comm, author of the book, What Google Never Told You: Making Monday with Adsense, advises that it’s still possible to state your case with Google, although the likelihood of them reopening your account is slim. He also suggests that when speaking to Google representatives, one should always “BE POLITE!” […]
Google are a bunch of SCUMBAGS and they need to be brought to their knees. They are basically another Paypal. You see it’s cheaper for Google to just keep signing up new people. This way they know they won’t have to pay a new person for like 3 months. They know that’s how long it will take to generate any revenue. Google will also use tactics such as not delivering your check. When this happens, you have to wait a whole other month to have it delivered. They have one massive offshore account they dump the money into so it collects interest. When and if a person does start to make any revenue from this joke of of a plan, Google will cancel their account, using some utter bullshit excuse, saying “invalid clicks” were found on your ads. Oh yeah…show me the proof! They will cancel a person’s account and then they will not pay you the revenue that YOU generated for them by GRACIOUSLY allowing them to keep their ads on your website. Websites that you pay the bandwith for. Websites that you market and look after. The blogging community needs to stick together and spread the word that these SCUMBAGS Google ARE NOT to be trusted. And i don’t care how good their search engine is. To tell you the truth it ain’t all that. I think Yahoo.com and Clusty.com are much better.
I think a formal class action should be filed and all us little people who they screwed should get our money. I do not care if it is $30 or $3000. I also feel this should be given to the media, CNBC, Neal Kavuto, Bloomberg. Nothing like some bad press to whip a bully into shape!
[…] I suppose any reply to them will be futile. Instead, I Googled the “AdSense Sucks” and read a lot of interesting stories about how people got their accounts canceled. Here’s a story where Patrick Stuart got his account canceled for no reason. […]
The first time Google Adsense people banned my website for saying there were invalid clicks which weren’t. No detailed reasons mentioned.Then I thought of coming with another website and then again signed for Adsense. I wanted to see how good and ethical Google is. I received an email saying ‘Congratulations ! you may not display Google ads’. So my new site started displaying Google ads. When I had almost made $100 and they were to pay me then again I got a mail saying ‘your account is found linked with an account previously banned….’ So they got money from advertisers from ads on my site plus they also snatched my earnings. Google is a fraud.Boycott Google. Instead use better search engines and use their ad service. Support Yahoo.com, Microsoft’s Live.com,
Mamma.com, Ask.com etc.
Ain’t Google just wonderful. When you get a letter from them about them seeing invalid clicks, they won’t give you ANY information about the suspect clicks, such as their IP address, or the date and time they were observed.
However, they WILL tell you that you need to alert them to any invalid clicks, even though their policies prevent you from using any technique to monitor those same clicks.
If there is a problem, Google won’t take your phone calls. When you write them, you are not likely to get a response. When they do respond, they will only give you a first name, and there is no way to talk to a supervisor.
I used to run Google AdSense ads on several of my sites. I was doing something called keyword-arbitrage, where I bought inexpensive Google Adwords, Yahoo and MSN ads to send people to my sites for topics related to their searches.
The pages that they landed on were then written about very specific topics that are related to expensive keyword ads. They would get to my pages, read, see the ads, click on them, and I would make money.
This works because alot of people don’t really know what to search for. If you cast a wide net on a topic, you can take people to a page that is about what they are really looking for. I used to also run ads for my own products on those same sites. Many of the visitors would click through and buy my products, so I know that they were real people.
I was spending around $1,000 per month on advertising, and was grossing around $3,000 per month in AdSense revenue - so, $2,000 per month profit. Google loved me so much that they sent a great Christmas present. It was one of those digital photo frames. Google loved me because - if Google pays 5% in commissions, they were grossing roughly $720,000 per year off of my efforts.
THEN ONE DAY I GET THAT LETTER.
I know better than to click on my own ads. I spent alot of time setting up all of those sites. They wouldn’t give me any evidence whatsoever.
So I have to shut down the sites… But I still have two checks in the queue from them. I get January’s $3,000 check. Then, February was going to be less because it was for only a partial month. Guess what, they docked me more than $400.
I wrote them a long letter, but trashed it. What’s the point. In this business, they are the police, judge and jury. They hold a secret trial for you and don’t let you see the evidence.
I hear that Yahoo is going to offer a similar system soon. Competition will be good for Google.
What I don’t understand is why there doesn’t seem to be an independant company that does something like what AdSense is supposed to be. I’ve seen other firms out there, but they don’t want to talk to you if you don’t have 10 million hits per month. My sites were getting alot of traffic - around 50-100K per month, but that was still too little to get setup with those firms.
I think that the whole PPC think is just to open to fraud. As an advertiser, I’m must more trusting of CPM. I also want to be able to completely control which sites my ads appear on. I’ve been on the receiving end of click fraud a few times, and it’s always some
fake search engine that’s an affiliate of a larger search engine, and that site is always a PR-0 site.
I will say this. At least you can get a human on the phone at Yahoo. If you’re click frauded, you still aren’t likely to get a refund from them, but at least the person on the phone appears to be concerned.
Sign me -
Looking for another ad source.
Google ripped me off too! I have a great webstore and ebay business, I drive alot of traffic to my webstore with op-in repeat customer email, so after 18 months building my google income, almost $500.00 monthly I get banned, just the same canned email everyone else gets for invalid clicks, they
got me for over $700.00 total earnings that where cancelled.
I already have a good income from my online sales, glad I didnt have to have the money, the F@@kers at google can keep the Money, legit online marketers beware of adsense,dont waste your time!
May/2007
I had the same experience with Google. They are crooks. I think they systematically select their victims randomly to make some extra cash.
I’ve posted about my experiences here:
http://lighterside.shijaz.com/2008/02/why-google-adsense-sucks.html
Well yes adsense is still doing the same thing. And yes as Shijaz said they are crooks.
My account was suspended a weak ago for invalid clicks, there wasn’t much money in there, just about 14$. I requested an appeal but they never responded. Just yesterday my brothers account was also disabled and the amount of money in it was also around 14$.
Now 14$ doesn’t sound much but when you check the detailed report you’ll see that 14$ converts to over 500$ that goes to Google’s account. And with so many accounts being disabled I guess that Google are making bug bucks but rest assured that this will change sooner or later as many people already knows about the Google scam.
I have recently switched to Adbrite and to tell ya the truth I’m not happy with there service as my balance has reached 0.07$ in like a week. Not very efficient so now I’m confused about what Ad service should I join to make big money.
Yes, they are crooks..
they especially scam indians who work very hard.
Hey Patrick, have you tried Chitika? Over the last year I compiled some statistics of my earnings and I actually earned twice as much with Chitika compared to AdSense. For those of you considering Chitika - try it! You can check out this Chitika review for more info and some cool screenshots.
well, we seriously have to wait to see what microsoft has to offer, I can’t believe it takes microsoft 2 years and we still havn’t seen any microsoft adsense yet
Happened to me too… If you want to get even with them there are adsense bypass add-ons for Firefox and IE. They block google ads from showing in google searches and on any site that is displaying ads from Google. Start offering them for download on your site. Before you know it everyone will be blocking Google ads
You guys should really try adbrite to make money. They’re even better than adsense and they do send you your money. you can make about 200$ a day if you really work on it and have a good strategy.
http://webcashier.blogspot.com