Blogging income can be earned from many streams with the most popular being Google Adsense. Over the last few days we have seen the banning of IncrediMail, one of the largest listed companies to ever receive a Google ban. I wont speculate on reasons behind the ban, however I think it is a timely warning to all bloggers who display any of the Google ad units to take care.
Google’s policies are fairly clear. The consequences of breaching them are just as clear – you will be banned and lose any income already accrued.
The two biggest problem areas are Invalid Clicks and Encouraging Clicks. To quote Google:
Clicks on Google ads must result from genuine user interest. Any method that artificially generates clicks or impressions on your Google ads is strictly prohibited*
Other areas to be wary of include the sites content, both the site and the ads behavior, the ad placement and competing ads. Failing to comply with Google’s policies:
we may disable ad serving to your site and/or disable your AdSense account. While in many cases we prefer to work with publishers to achieve policy compliance, we reserve the right to disable any account at any time.*
The bottom line is if you are looking to Google for blogging income then make sure you read their terms and conditions along with their program policies.
Just got banned by AdSense for making too much money on Feb 19, 2008. All websites that we had were generic business websites and everything was legal. Google Adsense’s email indicated a ‘bad business model’. Our translation is ‘We are paying you too much money’. Go figure. We had been up and running for over a year until our websites were getting noticed by Alexa.com and Google AdSense’s mysterious partners.