Well, well, well…I think someone at Google realized they made a big mistake.  I know I wasn’t the only one this week to get an email (with not specific information) from Google telling me my Adsense account was disabled.  I was too pissed off to bother filling out the re-instatement request and figured I’d just find another source for ad revenue.

This morning, however, I opened up my inbox and saw the following email from Google:

As you know, Google treats instances of invalid click activity
very seriously. We have reviewed your circumstances and have reinstated
your account, effective immediately. However, there will be a delay before ads
start running on your website. It may take up to 48 hours before all of our
servers are informed of the change.
We appreciate your patience, and apologize for any inconvenience. If you
have any questions, please feel free to respond to this email.
For your reference, you can find tips and guidelines for keeping your
account in good standing by visiting our Help Center at
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23921.

This just cracks me up. If I had to guess, some idiot programmer made a code change, put it into production, and screwed a whole bunch of people.  Luckily they discovered it before any decided to bring a class-action lawsuit against them (I admit to considering it).

I haven’t decided whether to keep serving up Google ads or not. There lack of true customer service still has me irritated.

I had the pleasure last night of opening up my email and finding an email titled “Google Adsense Account Disabled”. Here is what the email said:

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since
keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage
our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the
interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We
realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in
advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we’ve
taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information
by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

Obviously I was rather shocked and stunned by this. There was no previous warning and as you can see from the email, there are no details to help me determine what happened. When you click on the provided link there really isn’t much help there either. It appears that my account may have been banned due to “invalid clicks”, but I never click on ads on my sites so I don’t know how that could happen either.

I’ve done some searches on forums and this seems to happen to a lot of people that don’t know why. There’s no phone number or email support for Google to get any questions answered. There is an “appeal” form that I could fill out, but one of the required fields is “URL”, which I have over 50 and don’t have a clue which one(s) caused the problem. In addition, all of the info I’ve found in forums indicates the chances of a successful appeal are virtually zero!

I’m really pissed at Google right now. There holier-than-thou attitude and lack of any customer support if extremely frustrating. Part of me wants to appeal because I really don’t believe the ban is valid; but the other part of me wants to flip-off Google and ban THEM! The good news, I guess, is that I wasn’t making hardly any money from Adsense these anyways; so being banned isn’t going to financially impact me. It’s really just the principle of the thing.