Digital Point Forums banned from Google Adsense

[Bigwebmaster]

June 16th, 2009, 10:39 am

While it is not confirmed, there is much speculation on what is believed that DP is banned from Google Adsense. On their own boards there is a multi-page thread discussing the issue:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1368731

If you take a look at any of their threads you will notice the spot that shows a Google Adsense ad is blank. If you look at the source or right click on the area and view properties you will see that the Adsense code block is still there. On further investigation by their members, if you load their ad block from a proxy domain the ads show again. This seems to confirm that the Google Adsense account isn't banned, but the digitalpoint domain may be.

So why is this happening? There could be numerous reasons, but everything so far is speculation as nothing has been confirmed by any official source.

As you may or may not know the Digital Point Forums use a form Adsense Revenue sharing for its members. What this means is that when you post a topic, 50% of the views of that topic will show the thread starters Google Adsense ad if they have one. In that way the revenue is split between the topic starter and DP. Is this allowed? According to the owner of DP, Shawn Hogan, he read through all of the Google Adsense TOS and found nothing that said it couldn't be done. So that could be very well true. This means that DP is showing ads for probably thousands and thousands of different Google Adsense accounts. Doing something like this could encourage members of the board to self-click ads or form groups of members on the board who click each others ads for bloating earnings. While this may or may not be going on, its possible that something like this could be responsible for the entire domain of digitalpoint to be banned or temporarily banned if it is out of control. Or maybe Google doesn't like it when one domain is showing ads from numerous Adsense accounts? So instead of banning the accounts they just ban the problem domain.

Again this is just more speculation, but another thing that has occurred to me is all of the spam and signature spam going on over there. There are alot of questionable users over there that in my opinion can severely degrade the type of traffic the board receives and thus the type of traffic clicking on the ads. Could this lead to a ban from Google Adsense? I am not sure. Maybe its possible that the quality of the board is in a state that Google doesn't want to be a part of anymore for its advertisers.

If you look at Shawn Hogan's personal website blog:

http://www.shawnhogan.com/

and view the source you will notice that it appears his Wordpress blog has been hacked. It is littered with spam. Here is a screenshot in case it has changed since I have posted this:

Attachments:

Is it possible that something like this could ban the adsense ads if both websites are on the same server or using similiar IP addreses? The site is definetely linking to questionable content (only because it was hacked).

If you take a look at wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Hogan

It mentions in there that Shawn was once sued from the MPAA for downloading via a BitTorrent network Meet the Fockers and in August of 2008 he was sued from eBay. Ebay file suit for defrauding of eBay and eBay affiliates in a cookie stuffing scheme.

Is it possible that Google doesn't want to affiliate with websites such as this where the owner has been involved in questionable practices in the past? Maybe all of the elements above has played a role in their decision?

Overall it seems that there could be many factors in what has caused a ban or temporary ban of Google Adsense ads being displayed there. I have heard numerous reports in the past of other website owners having their ads blocked as well, but never really from a website as large as Digital Point.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think DP is in fact banned? Do you think DP should or should not be banned from displaying Google Adsense ads?

[joebert]

June 16th, 2009, 10:49 am

This isn't the first outage of the ads on DP. The same thing happened some months ago.

[Bigwebmaster]

June 16th, 2009, 10:55 am

Was there ever any explanation from an official source on why there was an outage a few months ago?

[joebert]

June 16th, 2009, 12:03 pm

The whole thing was one big speculation circus just like it is now if I remember right.

My gut tells me it has something to do with click-fraud rings taking advantage of the revenue sharing thing.

[joebert]

June 16th, 2009, 6:23 pm

Looks like they're back up again.

Must have been one of those automated hiccups that take days to trog through logfiles to sort out.

June 18th, 2009, 3:56 am

I recently check the digitalpoint & now they got ads from google

June 19th, 2009, 11:38 am

lovely elisha wrote:

I recently check the digitalpoint & now they got ads from google

yep... Even, I can also see the adsense ads on this forum.

June 21st, 2009, 1:43 am

Now I can see adsense @ DP

June 24th, 2009, 12:06 am

Well that was a temporary matter actually because I personally believe the Google ads on such websites with huge page views numbers a day will never get into troubles because Google already knows it can expect a lot of fake clicks made by some people and will simple discredit them but the reliability of the sites will always help.

July 6th, 2009, 3:29 pm

I think the whole idea of members clicking on ads to generate income for members must be against the adsense TOC.

I therefore won't sumbit my adsense accounts to any site that does that just so I won't get caught up in the crossfire if google gets nasty. There isn't enough money to me made out of it to put my account at risk!

July 7th, 2009, 3:10 pm

If you ask me, that forum (DP) is horrible to begin with. The unethical chatters (topics) and attitude in the community at whole is very unpleasant. While I won't judge anyone nor be presumptious, based on the impression I get of the people/mods there - something unethical matters could easily have been involved.

July 7th, 2009, 8:24 pm

LogicWeb wrote:

If you ask me, that forum (DP) is horrible to begin with. The unethical chatters (topics) and attitude in the community at whole is very unpleasant. While I won't judge anyone nor be presumptious, based on the impression I get of the people/mods there - something unethical matters could easily have been involved.

Never noticed that!

July 19th, 2009, 2:22 am

I also experience the same kind of matter, i thought dp were making some changes for thier site but after few days adsense ads were back. I think this happens because of fradulant clicks by users or dnt know. But good to be on dp..

July 20th, 2009, 4:44 am

Google Adsense ads are now visible on forum's thread. I think they sort out the issue with Google.

July 28th, 2009, 12:21 am

DP is a ad sharing forum. may be user have done too much of clicking in enthusiasm. just a kinda thought.