AdSense Account Disabled Without Reason

Imagine my surprise when my wife asked me to check on her AdSense and Blog which had been idle for the past month (due to some family health issues as well as going through a move) to find that her AdSense account had been disabled without warning.

Their typical response letter which so many bloggers have seen before was waiting in her inbox.

With our advertising programs, we strive to create an online ecosystem that benefits publishers, advertisers and users. For this reason, we sometimes have to take action against accounts that demonstrate behavior toward users or advertisers that may negatively impact how the ecosystem is perceived. In your case, we have detected invalid activity on your site and your account has been disabled.
We’re limited in the amount of information we can provide about your specific violation. We understand this can be frustrating for you, but we’ve taken these precautionary measures because intentional violators can use this information to circumvent our detection systems.
In some cases, publishers can make significant changes to correct the violation and are willing to comply with the AdSense program policies (google.com/adsense/policies). For this reason, we offer an appeals process as an opportunity to work with you to resolve the issue. To help you with the process, we’ve created a list of the top reasons for account closure for you to review before submission at http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=2660562. Please be sure to provide a thorough analysis in your appeal, which you can submit at https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/request.py?contact_type=appeal_form and we will follow up accordingly.

Naturally I filed an appeal to figure out why the site was banned, the site gets around 70 – 120 visits per day consistently and though there were only 2 new articles posted in the last 60 days it was not an inactive site, it only hosted original content or some guest articles from MyBlogGuest but nothing that should have been against AdSense ToS at all. In fact IZEA Media ads which runs on the site and uses Google AdSense behind it was working and functioning just fine still.

What I found was back in late July Google did send my wife an email to update her tax information in AdSense to receive payment. The problem is this was around the time where there was family health issues and my wife was basically offline for a month.  So she never updated her tax info, 2 months later AdSense is disabled.  Could Google have just disabled her AdSense account because she hadn’t gone in to update the tax info in the AdSense account?  My thought was they just would withhold payout until the tax info was updated.

They claim violation and potential click fraud, but I don’t see how that is likely unless somebody decided to get frisky with the AdSense on a guest post.  5 days before the Google AdSense account was disabled I had published a guest post from MyBlogGuest on the site, I think it probably is coincidence as I had published 12+ MyBlogGuest guest posts on the site previously over the years, but maybe the guest post author wanted visited the post and clicked ads or something around that happened, it is possible.

Google’s generic reply to our appeal request was even more upsetting:

Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you’ve
provided, as well as your continued interest in the AdSense program.
However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your
feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we’re
unable to reinstate your AdSense account.
Please know that, once we’ve reached a decision on your appeal, further
appeals may not be considered, and you might not receive any further
communication from us. Note that AdSense publishers whose accounts are
disabled for violations of our Terms and Conditions are not eligible for
further participation in AdSense. For this reason, you may not open new
accounts.
Also, accounts disabled for invalid click activity will receive no further
payment nor any reissue of previous payment. Your outstanding balance and
Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the
affected advertisers. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.
We understand that you may want more information about your account
activity. However, because we have a need to protect our proprietary
detection systems, we’re unable to provide our publishers with any details
about their account activity.

This blog has been in good standing with AdSense for over 3 years, it was at just the $100 balance when it was disabled and the funding and earnings were wiped out in a puff of smoke.  This policy of not allowing users to get a proper amount of information in why they were flagged to be able to explain or otherwise block a mishap from occurring is preposterous.

I especially think this time the account was banned for not updating the Tax Info and nothing to do with the site itself, if they found click fraud all they had to do was not count AdSense clicks from that IP address or subnet and known that it was target of something else.

For now I just setup my wife’s cooking blog under my own AdSense account, I have it set so that AdSense security only allows and shows for sites approved on my AdSense, in case the ban occurred from that blog having it’s feed pulled into another blog which was in violation where the clicks occurred.

If for some reason the same "click fraud" should happen and my master AdSense account get banned, looks like I will have to find an alternate revenue source when I lose that $200-$220 per month I was getting from Google AdSense.

-Justin Germino