Shoshana

I heard that sometimes google waits until user account reaches $100 to
ban people. Hope this is not true.
Letting people reach $100 to and then ban the account is dishonest and
cruel.

Imagine some guy who clicked in is own ads accidentally (it can happen)
or someone in her school or office clicked the ads without their
knowledge or whatever. He can be wasting months of his time, improving
his site and all this effort is useless because google already give him
the "to be banned" status".

Shoshana

We were banned after being successful for a year or more. But they did
it about a week into August, keeping all of Julys earnings plus
whatever had accumulated in August.
I think everyone except Google is getting screwed here.

Advertisers are upset because they don't like results and attribute it
to "click fraud", putting pressure on Google to do something. Google
terminates accounts left and right, mostly small fry, to show
advertisers they are doing something about it. But the reality is that
true click fraud continues and isn't really being eliminated by all
these terminations.

The reality is that PPC advertising isn't a viable means of promoting
or selling most things. I have an account as an advertiser on Yahoo,
going back to Overture before it was bought out. I've throttled it back
to spend less that $25 a month and I'm not sure I've ever gotten a real
customer out of it. At one point clicks went way up. Rather than
complain about fraud I just cut back on keywords and options. I won't
use Google at all after my experience as a publisher and I'm not sure
why I bother with Yahoo except that I've gotten it down to a very cheap
amount.

The whole model is flawed for most of those involved. Advertisers get
screwed by click fraud, which continues. Publishers get screwed when
Google shuts them down to show advertisers they're doing something. And
Google gets rich by charging advertisers and keeping money owed to
publishers they shut down. (Sure they "return it to the advertidsers".
Right. With no open accountability to either party I'm not buying
that.) So far they're rich enough to settle one lawsuit from
advertisers and still come out ahead. One of these days they'll have
more lawsuits from both sides plus competition from others implementing
some variation of this flawed model.

Shoshana

Yes Ive been banned before and its not a nice feeling, now I wake up in
the morning and worry if my new account has been blocked, I think
google is working on ways to tackle click fraud but as it stands now we
still hold our accounts in fear. Im always reading how people earn 1000
USD plus every month and I wonder how they manage that without getting
banned. Any way Im tired of worrying, and im no where near the 100 USD
threshold, so worrying for me hasn't even properly started.
I have decided to make a small web analyer, that monitors the users to
my account, it records their Ip address , the time ,date and what page
they were viewing, I cant know if any clicks were made but, I still
know how many unique users there were and how many impressions one
particualr user made, if i feel as though some one made too many page
impressions, their Ip wll be banned, im sorry if that sounds harsh but
what else can I do, should i get banned?, my addaption to my analyser,
maps the user ip address to their country so i can tell where my users
are comming from, it is good to have your user come from all around the
world rather than one particualr country.

I suggest if you are all worried, thatyou install some sort of
analyzer, that you can analyse the users comming to your site, this way
you all know whats going one. Im still developing my stystem a large
park of it works, i have other webmasters intrested and i will dish the
system out to anyone who wants it. free of course,

Shoshana

I hope someone from google takes notice of threads like this.
I've met 3 people IRL who have been banned from Google for "invalid
clicks" even though they did nothing wrong. I am sure of their
innocence, because they always speak openly of their illegal
activities, and they assured me that their behaviour with Google was
legit.

In contrast, I've NEVER MET ANYONE who has received a single check from
Google. Lots of hopeful people under $100 but no winners yet. lol, this
reminds me of the movie "The Island" where the prize = death.

I just started Adsense, and I've put a lot of work into it. Everything
I've done is legit. And I swear by all that's holy that if Google bans
me unfairly after I've done all this work, I won't take it lying down.