An Apparent Mass Extermination of Google AdSense "Publishers" is in Play

It seems from AdSense's support forum and various other sources around the intertubes that there has been a serious housecleaning to the AdSense publishers list. There are a lot of angry publishers in various places crying everything from "but I didn't do anything wrong" to "it's racism, because I am from an Asian country".

A very few of these claims, from what I have seen and tried to help with are somewhat difficult to nail down exactly why they were banned, but, as a whole, it's really not too difficult. Most publishers that are kicking and screaming, that actually leave their URL for investigation have proven to be web sites and blogs consisting of copied content, illegal downloads or other types of copyright infringements that were more than deserving of their ban. The others, I suspect have something to do with click fraud or policy infractions.

People need to understand one thing, AdSense is not in the practice of banning publishers for no reason, they lose money on the deal just like the publisher does, and when someone is banned, unlike some claim, Google does not "steal your money", it is returned to the publishers that have paid to have ads on the account that was banned. How do I know this? Well, I have used AdWords and I have had money returned to my account, that's how.

There are too many people out there that think they are smarter than AdSense, continually trying to formulate ways to game the system. Let me assure you, you are not smarter than the system. Their click analysis systems are incredibly sophisticated, and track much more than simple IP, User Agent, OS and any Google authentication information that may or may not be available. They track a lot beyond that, including behavior profiling, clicking patterns, patterns between other known users, clicker locations, bounce rate from advertisers sites and dozens of other items and behaviors. This is not a trivial system.

That also explains why, at times, your "estimated earnings" go down a bit here and there after being finalized, as after clicks are made and credit is given, they are sometimes later proven to be part of a click fraud scheme in which the click was likely an early participant in and it was pulled after the fraud was detected.

Some have suggested, the very rightly so, that the sudden increase in banned AdSense accounts could be attributed back to Google's Panda Update. Since the whole point of the Google Panda update, which I perhaps will cover in the future in more details, was to flag and lower rankings of web sites determined to be more spammy, whether it be lame advertising, copied content or any number of other reasons. It is easy to see how that same information could easily be trickled back to the AdSense publisher system for cleaning house there.

Google has as it's very first obligation, protecting it's advertisers, they are the paying customers, publishers are necessary part of the system, but publishers will be let go to defend their paying customers. Google has a massive group of publishers, with thousands coming all the time, so publishers are not rare and are expendable, and Google is perfectly within their policies to ban any publisher, at any time, for any reason. It's part of the policies publisher agree to when signing up.