Woke up this morning to an email from Google telling me my AdSense account had been terminated for invalid clicks and that any money I’d earned was being refunded to advertisers.
Well, that’s not good.
They don’t explain why, and per their Terms and Conditions they don’t have to. The strange thing is, over the last several weeks (content updates have been few and far between because someone decided to up and buy a house and take up residence at the Home Depot) ad clicks were way, way down. I mean, like fewer than half of the months before. So, I’m confused. Were all four of yesterday’s ad clicks invalid?
I’m also confused as to how I could have controlled invalid clicking, a task which their messaging seems to suggest I was in charge of. For as much as I’m a part of ye olde Interwebs, I still don’t actually understand a lot of it. Bots. Spiders. Whatever.
Anyhoo. I guess I can appeal, but the kicker is, how to appeal something I don’t understand? So. Looks like we’re rolling ad free – and I’m off to plan a bake sale. If only I were any good at baking.
What, exactly, is an “invalid” click? I’m confused as well. It’s either a click or it isn’t. Maybe someone clicked several times because their Internet was slow and it didn’t go through?
I’d give it a shot at appealing. At the very least you might discover what the offense was.
Laaaammmme. Maybe it’s because too many clicks were generated from one ISP? Someone may have thought they were doing you a favor by clicking through once a day…
What on earth is an invalid click? Of course you should appeal, hopefully it will be sorted out soon!
“Bum-mer” is an understatement.
That happened to us once on an adsense account we had associated with a school club. School started, club started back, people started clicking on the site for updates… terminated. (Because we took the summer off.) We disputed it and they still said eff you.
Nice.
So. Not. Cool. I assume it had something to do with a resurgence in traffic when I posted again after a week or so drought. When they took away a month a half of projected ad revenue, that stung.
Wow. I wish I could say I understand it, but I don’t either. But I am sorry. i understand being VERY busy and having something sneak up on you like this. I think I will help by making a very VALID CLICK over a the top right of your page. Enjoy your Friday and your new house! I am so jealous!
I think invalid clicking is when one computer is clicking on the ad a TON. I know people on YouTube that lost their partnership that way. I thought it was when they themselves were clicking on the ads though. Who knows, THAT SUCKS.
I hope I’m not making things difficult for my favorite bloggers (of which you are one) because I subscribe to them through Google Reader. It’s so convenient to have all my reading content delivered to a single place but I don’t see the original content unless I click through to the site. Does my subscription to your feed count as a reader? Do I count with your ad content? VALIDATE ME…PLEEEASE!
I’ve been following the blog (and browsing the archives) on my iphone. I’ve noticed it’s very hard not to unintentionally click on the ads. I don’t know how my touch screen thingies it would take to account for the invalid clicking, though.
Totally unrelated, but I was watching the news about the scary fires in Texas and got worried about YOU! Are you, the DL and the new house OK?
they did this to a friend of mine, too. i sense a pattern!
Were you doing display ads or search ads? And have you ever considered trying to join a network? There are networks made up just of bloggers (like Federated Media) and you could possibly get some larger deals from them. I work in advertising and I actually started reading your blog years ago after iVillage told me you were part of their group. (I’m glad you left though, the redesign was awful.)