Another AdSense canceled thread... now what?

Your first mistake was relying 100% on Adsense.

Check out other similars, including Chitika.

Good to know. I'm prepared for lower payouts.

Thanks again. Solid advice is what I was hoping for.

"I thought I was doing OK, and I was on the white hat side of the line..."

Since your AdSense was already banned, you can PM me one of your site and I can probably figure out why it was banned.

If your content was crap, you would most likely get de-indexed off Google.

tjcocker - have you written to Google? I had a problem a while back and simply wrote them a letter stating my case. All sorted!

Please don't allow this setback to affect you too much...

I am not sure what you mean by "Except, there's no clear lines, and apparently my content was not original or good enough"

Of course there are clear lines! Writing quality posts and publishing them is very clear. Not clicking on your own ads is very clear too. Not having images lined up with ads implying that the ads and images are connected is clear.

I hope you take up the generous offer to get your sites looked at and sort this out.

Poor writing is not a reason to have your account canceled, Google clearly think there is click fraud or similar shenanigans going on.

For the future I'd suggest that when you do your niche research you identify at least 2 or 3 affiliate offers you could use as well as adsense.

All The Best!!

Were these more of Xfactor type websites? I've heard that small websites with little comtent and adsense are frowned upon by Google.

It doesn't make sense.. but its what I've been hearing.

Can you elaborate more on what exactly you were doing? Your explanation might help others preserve their accounts.

Chitika is definitely not the solution, it is probably much harder now to get in there now than Adsense because they took over a lot of Yahoo Network Publishers recently.

The first thing you should do is to ask for the reason for the ban and appeal. In my experience, only cases of suspected click fraud are banned immediately. Googly usually sends out warning letters for other infractions before you are banned. I received several warning letters concerning the use of poor quality sites before I was banned. You did mention previously that someone tried to commit click fraud on your site.

Although there are ways of getting another account, you will not be able to use your existing domains with it. Therefore I would think twice before applying. Finally don't get too discouraged, it only took me a few months to replace the lost income through affiliate marketing.


Derek

why not sell them through flippa.com I'm sure if there are good and have traffic they would sell

thanks
andy

Get over adsense there are many other opportunities available. Even I was whitelisted among them but then they disabled my account saying illegal click activity which I have never done.

as was stated before, check out some of the similar programs available.

Same here. Working on a new 100% legit honest to goodness great content and information entertainment based website myself. No pitches, no hype, no naked girls... how's it gonna make money?

Copeac, Neverblue (look I didn't even include my affiliate links ha), Adbrite, CJ.com, CPALead, there are tons of possibilities and for all you know could equal to more revenue than you were making before.

Wow, thanks everyone for all the ideas and input.

I'll try to answer everyone's questions, maybe others can learn from my mistakes or figure out what I did wrong.

Ok, so I'll fess up. Yes, they were probably looked upon as MFA sites, but I did write original content. The problem is I didn't write a lot, some sites were less than 500 words... Also, I put "samples" of product reviews on the site from Amazon or elsewhere, but clearly indicated them as such and attributed them properly. I've seen that many other places.

No images of any kind, or few images in my content nowhere near the ads on most of the sites.

They all had good navigation.

All my sites are still indexed and ranked exactly the same.

Some of my sites have a PR4, a few PR3s, and a bunch of 2s and 1s.

I tried CPA offers, but they converted so bad I had to take them off, they were killing my ad clicks...lol Most of my sites were product-centered and didn't go well with 99% of the CPA offers out there. Even on my big screen TV websites I couldn't get a single conversion for the "win a free big screen TV" offers.

Xfactor type sites, yes. They had one ad box, text around it, a simple title bar, navigation bar, and that's about it. All hand-coded HTML.

A few months ago I thought I had some click fraud going on, but it was only one day, I sent off an email to Google asking them what was up, but never heard anything.

I don't tell anyone which sites are mine, so no family members or friends are clicking on my ads. I've heard about that, so I was careful.

Also, never got a warning message from AdSense. Unless this is the warning. I'll email them back for clarification and if they give me the time of day I'll try to get reinstated, but I'm not holding my breath.

I won't be using anyone else's name to sign up. I wouldn't be able to use my sites, and then would be starting over just to maybe get the boot yet again.

So, maybe the problem is that even though I thought the content was useful, it wasn't. I talked about yellow rain boots on my yellow rain boots site, reviewed them, provided other information, but once Amazon was closed for me the only thing visitors could do was click the back button, or on an ad. However, the problem with saying my content sucks is that I'm still ranked, and still have 1-4PR sites, so what's up with that?

You'd think Google would enjoy me creating a site that hooked up the people who are looking for yellow rain boots to their advertisers selling yellow rain boots. Otherwise if I made my site super awesome with 100% of what surfers were looking for, then why would anyone click away on an ad? Kind of defeats their purpose. If the company making yellow rain boots can't SEO their site to capture interested traffic, then why not allow me to do it for them?

Ok, since I'm no longer in AdSense, I'll spill the beans. I made around $100-$150/month after 10 months. First 6 months was less than $40/month. I was slowly increasing CTR from >1% to around 10%. Very little traffic per site even on page 1, maybe around 1-15 visits per day per site. These were low competition and low searches, but still took a while to get ranked due to my inexperience.

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. It stinks because it seems like you tried to do the right thing.

I'm wondering though, were your sites only 1 page?

I know it is in vogue now to make these 1 page websites that are based on a product and then put adsense on them. I'm sure Google knows about this and might be on the lookout for these types of sites as they are definately MFA no matter how unique the content is. Just wondering if that could be the reason?

As far as them being ranked and having PR, I'm willing to be that the adsense department and the search engine ranking department don't talk to each other.

Lee

On your site did you have a privacy statement,TOS, and a about you page. These days you really need a privacy statement on your sites. You need to explain that you might not be storing their Data but the google use a tracking cookie. It was in your adsense control panel

On any site with Adsense you need 6-10 pages of content. Vary the length try add a generic niche video. Make look like a web site not a MFA. As you make money expand your best sites with new content.

Well, if this "french" and "coffee" site I'm looking at is his (matches name and geographical location), yes, there's a privacy statement.

But seriously?

There's about 2 paragraphs of "real" text and then some Amazon review recaps on the homepage and that's it.

If all your sites are like this, that's why you're toast. No value, not even close.

As for the writing, it's acceptable—better than the $1 per article guy. You had a decent start, but you failed to finish. Had you put say 4 more pages of real content on these sites, you'd probably be ok.

You could have easily expanded to 5-6 pages, each about a different make/model and had "value."

You see, the problem with all these threads isn't AdSense, it's the people. It sucks that you had to learn the hard way. I hope more people pay attention. AdSense is wonderful. Heck, they don't even ask you to build a huge site. They just want *some* value.

I hope you turn things around.

tjcocker

I remember helping me out when Google do the same thing to me,Seems google is on the war path for site Because i seem to see in there forum alot of people being banned for alot of reason weather there ligit or not.

The best thing to do is move on to cpa,At least thats i did and its the best decision i have ever made.The only time now i bother with Google is by checking the stats and keywording, like the good old search engine is worth using for.

cheers

Unless the person contacts Google and actually asks them why they were booted from adsense then all we are doing is just wasting thread space by speculating.

I mean really, what is MFA? As far as I'm concerned EZA is the biggest MFA site on the internet and Google quite happily let them make their money...

I saw your sites too, only two problems:

The theme.
The amount of content.

I am think that your account was most likely disabled because of invalid clicks. This was probably done automatically by robots and that is why you were given no warning. I would check whether you had an abnormal surge in traffic on that day. I would appeal to Google telling them you would cooperate in any way you can.

If you have problems in getting a reply from Google, I would suggest that you go to the Adsense forum at Webmasterworld and contact the Google representative by pm there. The screename of the Google rep is AdsenseAdvisor

When mine was disabled, they did mention a particular site in the letter. That particular site was a minisite made from a Wikipedia article.

I think it is quite important for you to find out the exact reason and let us know. A lot of people are onto Xfactor and Clickbump sites here and it would be of great interest here.

I had two large well known and well maintained forums with lots of user contributed content that was deemed by Chitika to be not up to their standards. One of these sites was accepted into Burst Media and Casale Media and if that is not high standard, then I don't know what is.

Derek

I'll let you all know if I hear anything back from them. But it was my understanding that in the letter they would have either told me it was from invalid clicks or some other vague problem. All they talked about was content and said nothing about clicks. Also, my traffic was pretty low and steady, no surge of traffic or clicks lately.

Would a links page or maybe info links solve the problem of no other place to go in everyones opinion? Or is it nessisary to build all your websites up to 6-10 pages of content. I see alot of the 1 page sites but they are mostly blogs or word press type of sites.

Thanks
Brian