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.

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!

“….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

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

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.

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.

>>- 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.

Paul J

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.