The problem wasn’t the bans themselves – a decent percentage of them were likely justified. However, a great number of publishers found their accounts disabled with nothing more than a canned email and the sudden appearance of empty ad blocks on the “offending” sites. More often than not, these publishers were victims of “click bombing” – the practice of a competitor, spammer, or troll clicking on a webmaster’s AdSense ads multiple times in an attempt to disable the account.
Click bombing worked. Too well. And there was no clear recourse that webmasters could take to fight back against the bad guys. Webmasters were forced to take it on the chin, and some of them had accounts in good standing for years. It was the height of unfairness – and forums were bursting with accusations that Google AdSense reps sat in their ivory tower, banning accounts without the slightest regard for the little guys.
Well, guess what. Google is seeking to repair that image. Finally. Here’s the official word from a Google rep, as it appeared in a recent Marketing Land article:
