Google is so funny
A few people have e-mailed me about my missing Google AdSense ads. Instead of answering each e-mail, here is the story:
Those of you who read this blog regularly know that Google killed my account because of "invalid clicks", and since I was fooled into clicking my own links Google did the right thing. However, I wanted to get a chance to explain myself so I sent an appeal with a detailed explaination and an apology. And Google accepted my apology and re-instated my account.
So I put my ads back. But after a few days I got worried and decided to remove the ads temporarily just to be sure that Google would not find any "invalid clicks" that may have been caused by the attention that my re-instatement story got. And since I had gathered a whole lot of money on my account which I did NOT want to lose, I decided to remove the ads until I had got my next payment from Google. In my account, I could clearly see that I would get paid sometime after May 15th - which would normally mean at the end of May. And here comes the funny part…
I did not get any payment. Instead, the information in my account was changed into "after June 15th". Hooray, another month of waiting. This meant that I would either keep the ads online and make more money with the risc of being locked out again, or I would take them down and make no more money but feeling a bit more secure. I decided to stick to my plan and take the ads down. But on the very same day that I was going to do it, I could no longer login to my account. I had not got any e-mail from Google (probably because I had problems with my incoming e-mail at that time), so I had no idea what was going on. I sent a support question and got no reply - so I e-mailed the appeals address where they responded with the original e-mail that they had sent to me. I had seen it before: I was locked out because of "invalid clicks"!
Funny, funny Google! They pulled an amazing prank on me, fooling me into believing that they actually cared about me as a user!
I could write a much longer entry here. But I won't. I'll just conclude that Google did the wrong thing this time, and their action means a loss of thousands of dollars for me. Thank you Google, I'll keep that in mind for the future.
Comment from Sam
Time: July 1, 2006, 2:54
Hi Andreas
What do you think this's all about and why would google folks do that to you?
Also how they know if you clicked on your ads which resulted to "invalid clicks"?