p2pnet - rss feed: Google yanks p2pnet ads: II
p2p news / p2pnet: Google, perhaps not the best arbiter of fair dealings, believes in the maxim, Guilty until proven innocent.
The white strip on the right used to contain Google Adsense panels. But Google pulled them without discussion or warning because, it claimed, p2pnet had been ‘violating’ its terms of service.
Google also yanked the Google p2pnet search bar, which brought in a few dollars - a very few dollars - every month. The one you see at the moment is a temporary no-pay version while I find a replacement.
Except for the first few months when I opened the account in 2004, the Adsense income has been pitiful. But I need every penny I can get to keep p2pnet online so ………
Back to the allegation, once in a while p2pnet runs stories which may annoy someone and several people suggested perhaps the spurious clicks were, in effect, attacks on the site.
For example, jen_eric999 wondered, “doesn’t this mean that anyone can get anyone else’s ads pulled just by running a script against their site? Businesses could do this to competitors. Maybe some party that dislikes the content has ‘framed’ you with automatic clicks”.
On the day I received the ‘take down’ notice I emailed The Google AdSense Team.
“What are you talking about?” - I asked. “I’ve done absolutely nothing to enhance click-throughs in any way and I’m absolutely furious at your unsupported allegation. Please immediately send details to back up your claim.”
The next day I sent the email below to Google press contacts David Krane, corporate PR; Michael Mayzel, advertising PR; Nathan Tyler, technology PR; Eileen Rodriguez, consumer PR; and, Debbie Frost, international PR, with whom I’d had previous correspondence when Google was found to have been censoring news inside Communist China.
Hi all:
Part I:
My p2pnet Google account has been closed because of unsubstantiated and completely unwarranted claims that the site “violates our terms of service” and has been deliberately generating “invalid clicks”. [http://p2pnet.net/story/7791]
You have my word that this is completely untrue. On the two occasions I fell foul of your policies, I immediately remedied the situations.
p2pnet’s stance has created enemies and I’m writing to you to suggest Google may have been used as a weapon of attack. As a reader said to me in an email, “All you have to do is go to a competitor’s site and keep clicking on the Google Ads on their pages - mission accomplished.” And as another reader says in a comment post, “… I wonder, if the supposed bogus clicks can get a site booted off adsense, doesn’t this mean that anyone can get anyone else’s ads pulled just by running a script against their site? Businesses could do this to competitors. Maybe some party that dislikes the content has ‘framed’ you with automatic clicks.” [http://p2pnet.net/index.php?page=comment&story=7791&comment=33169].
If you’d care to reinstate my account with an apology, and agree to pay me the money you owe me, I’ll immediately close the account. That way, we can at least part company with no bad feelings, on my part, anyway.
Part II (for a follow-up to story 7791, above):
Is it possible for someone to run a script against another site to generate false clicks on that site?
Is it possible someone to simply go to a site carrying Adsense and click on the ads to generate false clicks?
Do you know if Google ever been used to attack sites via spurious ‘click generating’? If so, I’d appreciate an example or two.
What are your general comments on the story (7791) on Google’s decision to shut down the p2pnet account?
Cheers! And thanks.
Jon
http://www.p2pnet.net
I haven’t had a reply and No, I’m not holding my breath.
Then this morning I received this from ‘The Google AdSense Team’ -
As you know, Google treats instances of invalid clicks very seriously. By disabling your account, we feel that we have taken the necessary measures to ensure that invalid clicks will not continue to occur on your site. Due to the proprietary nature of our monitoring system, we’re not able to disclose any specific details of these clicks.
Publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed further participation in Google AdSense. However, if you can maintain in good faith that the invalid clicks we detected on your ads were not due to your actions or negligence, or the actions or negligence of others working for you, you may appeal the closing of your account.
Google reserves sole discretion in considering whether to take any action on an appeal.
In order to appeal the disabling of your account, please email us at adsense-adclicks-appeal@google.com with the details requested below.
Please compose a new email and do not reply to this message. We’re unable to consider appeals that do not contain all of this information:
- Your name
- Your company’s name (if applicable)
- Your publisher ID number (located in the AdSense code on your website with the format, pub-################)
- Your website’s URL
- Date your account was disabled
- Your website’s audience
- The source of your website’s content
- Frequency of content updates
- The primary sources of your website’s traffic
- The number of people involved with the administration of the site
- Any relevant information that you believe would explain the invalid click activity we detected
If Google decides to evaluate your appeal, we will do our best to inform you quickly and will proceed with appropriate action as necessary. If we have reached a decision on your appeal, subsequent or duplicate appeals may not be considered.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
To hell with that.
The take-down email was private. But there was also the Google search bar and for hours, until I had an email about it, in fact, every time someone tried to do a search they saw, “Forbidden” and, “Unfortunately, the site [p2pnet] violates our terms of service so your search could not be completed.”
Amazingly, Google even published my IP address.
Bearing in mind I’m totally clueless when it comes to anything even slightly technical, and given that Google’s policy is to suppose alleged ‘violators’ are guilty before making any effort to discover the true facts of the situation, I wonder if Google Adsense is, in fact, being used as a weapon to both deprive honest web site owners of income and cause them public humiliation?
Meanwhile, the ‘Team’ owes me an apology and the promise of an investigation as to how this came about in the first place. But I’m not holding my breath.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
not the best arbiter - Google: China search censor, January 25, 2006
Google pulled them - Google yanks p2pnet ads, February 1, 2006
previous correspondence - Google China censorship: more, October 2, 2004
=====================
If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate. It’s a free DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.
Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.
February 4th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
I am one of the only people that I know in my ring of webmaster friends that hasn’t had my ads pulled. I follow googles rules very closely. But I only make a buck or two a month (thinking about pulling them off, since user donation is much more effective and far less annoying) a couple of people I know made say, 100 bucks in a month and google pulled them for invalid clicks, etc… My thought is that if your site makes good money off of the ads, they pull you. Who ever made money by spending it? I’m sure google doesn’t like to spend it either.
February 4th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
I think Jon you should reconsider their request. Looking at their questions I think it may help them understand why you have so many clicks and why these bring in a small percentage of “sales”
I’m sure they use some formula to decide what is normal traffic.
Your info will let them tinker with the formula.
Don’t let your pride get in the way
The questions look very easy to answer.
February 4th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
—Don’t let your pride get in the way —
Pride has nothing to do with it.
Google has publicly accused p2pnet and, hence, me, of ‘violating’ their terms, in other words, of being dishonest. And they’ve made this charge with only a vague description of what I’m supposed to have done because the ‘monitoring system” through which Team Google arrived at its erroneous conclusion is ‘proprietary’.
This is exactly like someone being found guilty of some offence which can’t be described in detail because the procedure which defines it is secret. Isn’t that something which happens in closed rather than open societies?
This isn’t a trivial matter. Before I removed the search code, unknown thousands of people saw “Forbidden” in bold letters, followed by the completely unsupported message that p2pnet had been ‘violating’ its terms of service.
In my mind, anyone seeing that would have every reason to believe something serious must have occurred for Google to have taken that kind of drastic action,
So it’s not for me, having been publicly humiliated and accused of some kind of dishonesty, to help Google improve its monitoring system. It’s for Google to make sure it’s 100% reliable before employing it, and not to make statements without being sure of the facts.
Having said that, if Team Google will admit they were wrong and apologise, I’ll answer the questions and help in any other way I can.
Cheers!
February 4th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Setup a dummy account with google ad sense. Get someone else to try and get you banned by just continuos clicking.
I also get the feeling this might have been caused because of the disclosure of googles operations in china, which could affect their public image. They probably don’t like any bad publicity.
February 4th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
I knew I should have kept the word “pride” out of it…it’s a trigger word.
Maybe if you gave them the information they needed…they would see their mistake and apologize.
At a minimum google is a 2k per yr revenue stream for you until you replace their ads.
If you answer their questions you’ll get another article out of it.
February 4th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
P.S. I would never have titled this “Don’t let your pride get in the way.”
No sarcasim is implied nor intended. I just believe that you should try to resolve this. The workers that have to do this job at google have very limited options and strict rules. Help them help you.
February 4th, 2006 at 10:24 pm
Don’t give in on this. I saw the Forbidden thing and I have to say that it made me wonder.
Paul J
February 5th, 2006 at 12:31 am
I have a better idea…Try to get google back…If you get them back put all the money in your children’s college fund so you’ll remember why you filled out their bureaucratic form…with answers like…
>>- Any relevant information that you believe would explain the
>> invalid click activity we detected.
“While it’s difficult to guess what you thought you saw…my web page is updated constantly all day long and gets 1000’s of hits from 1000s of regular viewers. These readers have a narrow interest so the google adsense ads rarely change…narrowed still by my own ethics and efforts to block advertisers that I think are dodgy. My web site is clean and simple - making clicks on advertisors very inviting. Possibly some viewers treat my site as a portal to these advertisers …always on the watch for new products and deals.”
JUST SUPPOSING.
February 5th, 2006 at 1:08 am
I ran up on this on a related subject dealing with Google and it’s data keeping.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6034666.html
Within the text of this article is this quote on page 1:
” Q: Why does Google store that information about me, anyway?
No law requires Google to delete it, and there are some business justifications for keeping it.
For instance, keeping detailed records can help in identifying click fraud (faking clicks on Web ads to drive up a rival’s cost), and in optimizing search results for different geographic areas. Compiling a user profile can aid in tailoring search results in products like Google Personalized Search. Also, disk storage is cheap, and engineers tend to prefer to keep data rather than delete it. ”
Since according to the data on this article, Google can determine who it was that did all this clicking or if it was one party or more. Also with the mention of another answer on this article was the thought that small sites that don’t have much traffic to it are preferrable to larger sites that may actually have to pay dollars out to. Meaning that larger sites aren’t the ones they want presence on if it costs them money. The easy way out is to claim click fraud without having to support those claims with facts. Hence it may well be that because of your success, they deem they are actually having to pay for the advertisement and hence it is not as desirable site as a smaller site that they get almost for free.
It is with the suggestion of this article, within the scope of Google’s data to be able to prove or disprove their claims and identify just who is doing this, if it is someone wanting to present this site problems. It is also readily evident that Google thinks it will go away if they don’t address the issue and just punish the site owner.
So now you know one of the methods Google uses to increase it’s profits, no matter the cost to others.
February 5th, 2006 at 1:10 am
I forgot in the writing of the above that it is my typical behavior after each and every google search or visit to a website to remove the cookies I have picked up there unless it is one that I am fairly sure of.
Without the cookies, the only way to trace a user is by ip number. Given that more and more legal investigation units are getting used to the idea that anyones’ search data may be of use in a case, when my ip number changes, so does the connection to a life long data base over my searches.
February 5th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
There comes a point when these internet companies become so huge that losing individual users is not even considered “the cost of doing business”, but rather “who cares”. You’re absolutely right about the “guilty until proven innocent” policies, they all have them. Now you know what the RIAA/MPAA victims feel like, although in this case your livelyhood is not likely to be completely crushed.
February 5th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
But in this case google is Jon’s customer.
February 5th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
Big companies and governments walk over the little guy all the time. They do this and destroy lives simply because thay have been allowed cause damage and simply walk away. If a big company painted you to look like a sexual predator or a thief and that caused you to lose your job or people not to talk to you anymore, then that company has damaged your life. The RIAA and MPAA and hundreds of other companies steamroller the little guy all the time. However enough people fighting back will make a huge difference. The “barbarians at the gate” is something all big companies are afraid of.
I for one have not used google for quite some time. I also recommend sites such as http://www.google-watch.org/ . I believe that those of us who know Jon should support him by sending emails to protesting Google’s blacklisting of Jon’s site. HOWEVER, ONLY DO THIS IF JON REPLIES TO THIS MESSAGE SAYING THAT IT IS OK. Since Google has publicall impuned Jon’s integrity, it may also be prudent for Jon to open a libel action against Google in small claims court. This will eith result in a judgement being issued against Google or Google having to actually come to court and show any of its evidence to prove that Jon is guilty. I guess that I’m going to have to find some funds to send to Jon. Cyberscan
February 6th, 2006 at 6:13 pm
Jon, I assume you probably saw this Boing Boing [1] blog where Cory quotes Technorati:
“….Beyond that, about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud. Technorati continues to take an ecosystem approach to solving this problem, working closely with other players like Amazon, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Drupal, Google, MSN, Six Apart, Tucows, Wordpress and Yahoo, and there will be another Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit this spring, building on the success of the previous two summits.”
I wonder if Technorati could give you a heads-up on click fraud?
[1] http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/06/spam_blogs_blogs_and.html
February 6th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
If you check the newsfeeds you’ll see that BMW in Germany is in the same situation for the same reason. So you’re in good company Jon!
February 7th, 2006 at 1:08 am
Thanks, Nick. I’ll have a look.
But this may be a silver lining. I’m trying out Adbrite where Nonsense used to be.
Who knows? Maybe it’ll be an imrovement and if it is, I’ll certainly do a post on it ; )
Cheers!
February 7th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
Does this mean if we all click like crazy on ads in Gmail that Google will ban itself? I’m clicking….
February 26th, 2006 at 7:00 am
BTW: Is it me or is every single reply here the same post? If that guy got ahold of your adsense ad, there’s your culprit there! Freakin epeleptic episode on that mofo.. Anyway…
Just appeal. Doesn’t make sense to essentially whine here thinking your readership is going to pressure Google to reconsider. Click fraud threatens the entire multi billion dollar industry, and they’re very unlikely to give special exception due to a couple of nasty posts online. You should visit Webmasterworld.com.
If they’ll yank BMW from their search results, they’ll definitely not think twice about yanking an Adsense account.