GoogleAds & PBH

Readers and those concerned:

As one may have noticed, PBH has been absent of Google AdSense advertisements for the past 24 hours. This has come following an email that can be summarized verbatim as so: “It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense account.”

First off, this came as a shock. The immediate response was to hit reply and say “What – can you please give details beyond an automated message?” But my thought-out response has been what brought this on?

I did not pursue any attempts to falsely generate clicks or alter Google code – and no one else active with PBH has either. And with a majority of my traffic coming from the United States, it seems unlikely foreign traffic may have been responsible for this. Since my site has a small but strong following – could repetitive clicks from a patron cause this to happen? Further, could a PBH author who was writing an expose of the inaccuracy of the contextual Google Adsense system be responsible through research by clicking?

It seems highly plausible. But whose shoulder does this fall upon? It seems that an automated system picked whatever was deemed to be ‘invalid clicks’ – considering the email and the lack of replies so far. If this is true, Google seems to have been able to weed out such clicks on its own. Why can they not do this successfully without penalizing the publishers? I understand when Google’s goal is to avoid fraudulent sites, but is there a need to remedy situations with drastic actions when it could apparently take care of such efforts on its own end? To the creators and participants on PBH, the answer seems to be a simple no, and we wish were still apart of the Google AdSense program.

To this point, I have not received an answer from Google.

In the short term, this means PBH is out of approximately 250 dollars it had earned in one month (with no distinguishing between what was invalid and valid clicks – what can be assumed about money that we are not going to receive?) that would have been used entirely to cover hosting costs. Since this is intended to be a public forum – anyone can sign up to blog or comment – the ads were intended to allow these abilities be available for everyone to use.

In the long term, this means we may be switching to another form of ad system if we do not hear an appropriate response back from the Google team. We appreciate everyone’s use and contribution of this website, and we’re all excited to see it grow into a community.

Thank you,

Alec
PBH Administrator
alec@prosebeforehos.com

Hrmph.

Google Ads

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