Google Updates AdSense Appeal Form For Disabled Accounts

I just noticed that Google has updated their AdSense Appeal Form. No, my account wasn't disabled.

The AdSense appeal form is for users that had their AdSense account disabled mainly for invalid clicks. The old appeal form, used the words Invalid Clicks while this new appeal form is titled Invalid Activity.

Lately, it seems like many people have been complaining about losing their AdSense account. Google is possibly cleaning house or has come up with a better way of detecting policy violations and click fraud. Along with that comes a large number of appeals. Google seems to want to make it easier for disabled account holders to provide the correct information in their appeal.

Some of the questions they've added to the form are quite interesting. I'll review the new questions and an explanation of them.

A successful appeal isn't very likely but review the questions below and try to answer them as best as you can. You only get one shot at an appeal so take your time.

If your AdSense Appeal is denied you can try these AdSense Alternatives

Who are the intended users of your site?

A description of who you target your site for. If you had a digital camera review site, you'd be targeting consumers shopping for digital cameras. If you had a gardening forum, you're intended users were people who like to garden.

From what parts of the world do your users view your site?

You'll need to look at your logs to see where your users are coming from. If you have a Google Analytics account, that will make it easier for you, since it geocodes the IP address of your visitors and presents that information in a map. If you're site targets one country, but many of your clicks and impressions come from another, that may be cause for concern. While it may not be economically feasible for people in more developed countries to get paid to surf and click on links, that's not true for some others. So if you're site is about antique shops in Vermont, and all your impressions and clicks come from Malaysia, that's not going to look good.

How are your users accessing the web? (e.g. Internet cafes, home DSL lines, mobile devices, university / office intranets)

Depending if your site is targeted for students, businesses, mobile users, you might have most of your traffic coming from networks that appear to come from the same IP address. This is usually rare as most sites don't target one specific company or university and I can't think of many real world scenarios where most of your visitors would come from Internet cafes or other public access points. Google seems to have many ways of detecting invalid clicks, IP address is just one of them.

Does your site content include content copied from other sites on the web (not including RSS feeds)?

Using copyrighted content without permission is against AdSense policies, as well as being illegal. It seems many accounts have recently been disabled for this reason. It's possible that Google has come up with better algorithms for detecting stolen content.

What is the source of your site's content?

This could be a number of sources such as all original content you create yourself, syndicated content from RSS/Atom feeds, documents in the public domain, user contributed content such as in forums, etc.

How many people are involved with the administration of the site?

This one's pretty self explanatory.

How often do you update your site?

This should be an easy question to answer provided you are the one contributing/adding content to your site

Have you ever purchased traffic to your site(s)?

Purchasing traffic is against AdSense policies. Google sees tons of traffic each day and has likely come up with ways to detect paid traffic. No point lying here. If you did, time to come clean and promise to never do it again and hope that's enough.

Have you ever signed up for services that give users incentives to visit your site/ads?(e.g. auto-surf, pay-to-read, pay-to-click)

Again, this is against AdSense policies and Google is pretty good at detecting these things and if you were banned, likely has some evidence of this. No point in lying, that just makes you look worse.

How do users get to your site? How do you promote your site?

What are your main sources of traffic? Which search engines, directories, social networks, websites that link to you etc. I think providing some information regarding how much volume from each. Remember, when AdSense is loaded on your site, they get some information, so if you lie, they will likely know. If most of your traffic doesn't have a referrer that might be suspicious since most browsers send a referer header.

Why do you believe the traffic to your Google ads is valuable to advertisers?

This is important. Google isn't paying you to blog. They're paying you to expose advertisers to your traffic. Why should the AdWords publishers benefit from showing ads to your site's visitors? In some cases, they may not. For instance, if you have a site where most of your visitors are children, what value is there in showing ads to people that don't have money to buy things?

Would visitors to your site have any reason to increase your AdSense earnings? If so, why? (e.g. do they know you personally, are they part of an online community, or do they support a particular cause)

Do you have any incentives for people to click on your ads? Do you tell them that a percentage of ad revenue may go to a certain cause? Do you tell them if ad revenue increase you will add more features or upgrade hardware to make the site load faster?

Have you or your site ever violated the AdSense program policies or Terms & Conditions? If so, how?

Describe anything you might have done that violated AdSense Policies. You should review them and think about it before filling out the form.

Any relevant information that you believe may explain the invalid click activity we detected

Go through your logs and see if there's anything that stands out as being strange. Did you get a lot of traffic from a spam site recently? Did someone email you and tell you they were going to click bomb you? Did you get a lot of strange traffic that didn't have a referer set? Whatever you can think of. Take the time to find out as much as you can.

Any data in your site traffic logs or reports that indicate suspicious IP addresses, referrers, or requests

Any data you discovered to answer the previous question should be pasted here. There might be a limit to how much information you can submit, so try and keep it focused. Chances are a real person will be reading it so you want it to be as short but meaningful as possible. They likely go through many of these.

If your account was disabled, you shouldn't fill out the appeal form right away. Take the time to go through your logs and web statistics such as Google Analytics and see if there's anything odd. Try and think of what might have caused it. Carefully review the Google AdSense Policies and review your site page by page to make sure you're in compliance with it. Check your Privacy Policy statement to see if it's appropriate. Check your content to make sure you haven't been hacked, or that a user hasn't uploaded or submitted inappropriate content. Whatever you can think of. You're not going to think of everything when you're upset about being banned, so take your time and do it right. Your first appeal is your most important. They might not look at a second appeal that was submitted soon after the first.


If your AdSense Appeal is denied you can try these AdSense Alternatives