Banned from Adsense - FAQ

There are so many "I was banned from Adsense" threads that i figured it is time to compile a small FAQ. Feel free to ad to this with constructive input too


*) I was banned from Adsense, My Adsense account was disabled
Can i have a new account?
How does it work with an appeal?
How can i avoid such a ban happening in the future?

You might be surprised, but the best and first thing you should do is to realize the following, It will help tremendously:

If you are an Adsense publisher, Google is your client - you really need to look at it this way.

You, as a web site owner, have the privilege that Google uses your web site to feature ads on your site. While you are also making money from the ads on your site, it is actually Google who uses your site for THEIR business, foremostly.

Their priority is to provide a quality experience to their Adwords clients.

From that point of view it should be clear that Google, as YOUR client, does not have an interest seeing that someone has a low quality site, misleading ad placement, low quality traffic, copied article content and so forth.

Do NOT forget there are millions of web sites out there - you are ONE of them and there are millions of sites besides yours.

If you realize this, it might help you thinking over your own strategy, your site layout, the overall impression YOUR site makes to the site visitor and the occasional manual reviewer from Google.

*) I was banned, what now?

If you got banned, there are several things you can do:

APPEAL

The most obvious thing to do is filing an appeal, but i can tell you already that the chances that your appeal will be successful are extremely, extremely slim.

If you realize that Google is your client, it should be obvious that the obligation is on you to convince Google that YOUR SITE is indeed worthy of featuring their ads to THEIR customers - as opposed to ignoring your appeal and your site simply because there are a zillions of others.

Before you try for this slim chance of an succesful appeal, you should post all your questions etc. on the Google webmaster forum.

This includes showing and asking about whether your site's ads layout is ok as well as asking for other advice on the forum in regards to improving your site's quality and user experience.

Only if you are 100% sure that whatever mistakes you made which lead to your ban are resolved you can TRY to file the appeal.

If you instead show ignorance or rather use the appeal to point out how you think you did nothing wrong it will likely fail.

This is not the time to plead or convince Google - instead you need to PROVE and show them that you are serious about your business/site.

- SECOND ACCOUNT

If your appeal failed (very likely) there is basically no way to get a second Adsense account, ever again.

However, there are some (what i would call) "loopholes".

1) You can apply for a Adsense Business account. This means you need to have a legit, registered business with tax nr., bank account different from your personal bank account etc.

2) It should be possible that a relative of yours, like your spouse etc. is applying for an Adsense account.

Before you do ANY of that above...again you need to know what indeed led to your ban in the first place and how to avoid this in the future! And then you need to simply improve and do things better.

*) Reasons for a Ban

It is my personal opinion that Adsense is not a place where you are in a position to gamble, eg. with tricky and misleading Ad placements, crappy MFA sites etc...

SOONER OR LATER - someone will review your site and your risk a ban if you do not satisfy their requirements.

Google has become really rigurous weeding out low quality sites, they started to do this many months ago on Adwords basically banning all affiliates, they are weeding out content farms and autoblogs.

Google has no interesest providing a low quality experience to their adwords customers with low quality and badly converting clicks.

A MFA ("made for adsense") site and misleading "tricky" ad-placement will benefit only YOU with a higher CTR (click through rate) - but is hardly in Google's (your clients!) interest AT ALL and its also not in the site visitor's interest.

I am pretty convinced that Google tracks click "quality" and conversions amongst other things also...and if this is bad it might also trigger their bots respective a ban in the long run, along with other factors.

Big No-Nos:

*) Mimicking menus with link units
*) Not providing a good user experience, eg. bad or missing site navigation (aka "link unit instead of menu")
*) Ad <--> Content ratio bad (too many ads, not enough content)
*) Too many ads above fold before the actual content (Site visitor comes to your site and all he sees is ads with a need to scroll down to actually see content)

---> DO NOT look at other sites and do what other sites do, because this does not mean it will work for you. Who knows, maybe that other site just got by because it didnt get a manual review yet...or the human reviewer was simply just in a good mood at that day.

What if YOUR site gets reviewed?

What if an Adwords customer who pays good money for their clicks would go on your site right now to see whether your site is really a good place for THEIR ads?

See where i am going with this?