Adsense Has A Scam Side

It is true that every publisher agrees to the Google "Terms & Conditions" at the initial sign-up. It is, in fact, a contract. But implicit in that agreement is the responsibility of the parties to execute the agreement in a fair manner as prescribed by the agreement.

You maintain that Google has the unilateral right to decide that the agreement has been violated. You further maintain that no detailed explanation of the violations to the publisher is due or necessary. That may be satisfactory when no money is involved. But when consideration is in contention you can be sure that both sides have their rights. Were this not the case no contract would be necessary. Everyone would just sign up with Google and hope for the best.

The fact is that Google gets away with what it does by knowing that the small website operator cannot afford to litigate a dispute over a few hundred dollars with an internet giant like Google. So Google just moves along steamrolling individual websites owners until, at some point in time, the website owners join together in class action.

You say that you, doubt the Google legal dept are that bothered. That may be true but they should be bothered. Any company like Google should be concerned with how it treats its customers/partners. Lumping the "10 mistakes" in with the "90% violators" just because they think they have all the power on their side is arrogant. And ultimately that arrogance can be costly.

Sometimes you win in a court of law but you lose a lot of money and good will in the process. Google should take steps to deal with its publishers in a fair manner rather than purposely creating an atmosphere of acrimony. How much is bad publicity worth to a company like Google. Only they can decide that.

It makes no differennce that money was involved, and it makes no difference how much money was involved. The fact is each publisher agreed to the terms, If they didn't like the terms they shouldn't have agreed to them.. That is all there is to it.

Information I have read regarding this kind of thing was not so much on where or how the funds were allocated... but moreso on how the information is handled regarding banned publishers.

For example, I vaguely remember reading about an SEO expert who had been banned by google on his hobby website that he had pretty much forgotten about and he was given a standard letter by google stating his adsense account was terminated.

Now, he didn't mind since he had been using adsense for 6months plus and had barely reached the threshold to be issued a pin number. The problem he had was how google had labelled him a 'fraudster' by declaring he had delierately attemtped to artificially inflate his earnings in some form ... via the standard termination notice.

This guy being an SEO by profession, relies on favourable working relationships with his clients who are often high levelled businessmen in the advertising industry ... the same industry that he has been accused by google of being a fraudster ... his concerns were :

How did google inform their publishers?
Was there a list on a toilet wall labelling him a fraud?
Did google proactively inform advertisers of individuals who had their publisher accounts terminated?
Did google release any personal information that could identify him?
Were all google employees bound by a confidentially agreement for non-disclosure of such information?

And numerous other concerns ... as if is privacy was not protected fully by google, and google unwilling to provide information on why he was banned from the adsense programme, he could potentially suffer bankruptcy/ unemployment or severely reduced clientbase due to obtaining a 'bad reputation' which google were responsible for giving him.

Those were issues that I would have thought any lawyers would be interested in addressing over and above the terms and conditions of the actual adsense publisher agreement over the '10%' mistakes being made regarding funds ... but 10% mistakes being made regarding reputations etc

This is a very interesting discourse, and I think it will be interesting to see how things play out over time. I'm not sure that Google has any obligation, legal or otherwise, to explain what they view as fraudulent behavior to publishers who have been banned. There are a lot of "grey areas" in the AdSense ToS, and this leaves its enforcement open to interpretation. I would think that by not explaining their actions, however, they leave themselves open to litigation by disgruntled publishers. I think that Google's legal counsel is probably very aware of these issues, and I would guess that their current strategy is what they think is best for the long-term success of the company. Whether that proves to be true remains to be seen, I suppose.

Sam

B-mann is absolutely right on this post!

I had my biggest AdSense month last month after promoting my sites with AdWords. Then, when it gets near the end of the month and time to get my check sent out, Google locks me out and sends the robot email about suspecting click fraud.

I appealed it twice and both times received robot replies saying I was out of luck. Something like, "You may not agree with our decision, but we hope you understand."

Yea, I understand that Google just stole a month's worth of traffic from my sites to give to it's advertisers and is now trying to get out of paying me.

They (through robots) are claiming that it's their "sole discretion" not to pay, not to disclose why they disabled my account, not to entertain appeals, and not to bother replying to me.

I'm not happy. It's been 10 days and I've been really patient, but no one replies to my emails begging them to look into it. I've offered everything I could think of, but no luck!

So, now I need an attorney, because the amount they owed me is more than I can file in Small Claims Court.

I never knew this was an issue, until it happened to me! Now I'm seeing thousands of posts about it all over the net. I'm all for a class action lawsuit. Unlike someone mentioned in this thread, I feel they ARE obligated to pay me for all VALID traffic. That's fine if they don't want me in their affiliate program anymore. That's their prerogative. But pay me what you owe and I'll be on my way! Go ahead and deduct the supposed click or two they deemed as suspicious. Now how about the other 15,000?

And yes, I read their TOS repeatedly and fully understood it. They imply that if you break the rules you're out. I broke no rules and received no warnings. If they want to claim "sole discretion", they can pay up and close my account. If they want to call me a fraud and try to keep all my affiliate commissions, then they better prove it in a court of law.

At first, I thought it was an honest mistake or a precaution, due to the surge in traffic I had during the month. But, when they failed to reply to any of my pleas for help, I began to think that wasn't the case at all.

I also wondered if perhaps they were just reviewing all my logs and verifying things, before they allowed me to continue. But that didn't really make sense, because they could've done that without disabling my account. Plus, they could've simply replied and said that was the case. Instead, I'm running all over the net wondering what's going on with Google and are they really out to scam me.

Then, I find this thread. It may be a few months old, but I just wanted to say that Google AdSense is obviously still at it with the scam! I'm going to share this link with the dozens of other people I've seen on other forums posting about it happening to them too. Thanks B-mann!

Any advice on how to pursue this would be great. Not only am I out my legit earnings, but I'm out the thousands I paid AdWords to promote my sites! I was under the impression that the billionaire Google could be trusted and I'd be able to replace my ad expenses after I received my AdSense earnings. I even took out a loan to pay for it based on that fact. Little did I know, I was gambling and my number might come up for unexplainable termination!

Richard