Q and A: Why was my AdSense account cancelled for no reason?

Dear Kalena...

You wrote in an article:

"7) Place arrows or images next to your ads to draw attention to them. You can see two different versions on this search engine article library page - http://www.searchenginecollege.com/articles/article-library.htm - at the top (where a pointing hand directs your eye to the ad) and the bottom where 3 images draw your attention to each of the three AdSense ads."

and Google banned one of my sites, their excuse:

"Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. For example, publishers may not use arrows or other symbols to direct attention to the ads on their sites, and publishers should not place ads in such a way that users are likely to inadvertently click on those ads."

The funny thing is that was a text only site and all the adverts had the title "sponsored links"! So be careful cause they consider it wrong, just if you want to investigate the banned site is www.anabella.com.ar that was a exact copy of my other site www.awebcamgirl.com only that the advert was inside the white square in the middle (the iframe). Do you see anything wrong? I don't but they just banned it!

Sorry to bother you, I just wanted you to tell this to prevent more people to be banned for nothing.

Ana

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Ana

Thanks for your email. You are quite correct in that the use of arrows or symbols to draw attention to AdSense ads goes against Google's TOS. When I first wrote that article, I was not aware of this and it was not specifically mentioned in their AdSense program policies.

But, like you, I received an email from Google advising me of the problem and asking me to remove them. I did so immediately and re-wrote my article to avoid confusion. See my recent blog post about the whole saga. Unfortunately, my article had already been picked up and syndicated by several sources and although I tried to alert as many publishers as I could about the revised article version, the old version is still floating around in places.

When you say Google has "banned" your site, do you mean cancelled your AdSense account? From my understanding, Google should have given you 72 hours notice to comply with their AdSense policies before they cancelled your AdSense account. If you promptly removed any arrows or symbols within this timeframe, your account should have remained open. However, you mention the use of iframes with AdSense code - I believe that is against the AdSense program policies so that and the fact that you had two identical sites on two different domains showing AdSense ads has probably contributed to one of them being disallowed.

If instead you mean your site has dropped from Google - if you had two sites with identical content, it is more likely that they are simply ignoring one of the sites, rather than having banned it entirely. The fact that both domains are showing a Toolbar PageRank of 4 out of 10 supports this theory.

Hope this helps!

---------------------------

[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]