I had some bad luck with Google AdSense last year, and wondered if anyone else has had similar experiences.

I had been running AdSense on my site for over a year, but then had a large influx of users and traffic which resulted in a large increase in ad revenue. But not more than a month after reaching the payment threshold Google canceled my account.

As for why it was canceled, I'm still not sure. Google would say nothing other than 'you violated our policies', but since they have more than a few policies I have no idea which it was. My best guess is that I, or my wife, accidentally clicked on one of the ads while browsing my site. If that was the case it wouldn't have been a frequent occurance, but if that's their reasoning for the cancellation that's fine...my bad. But their silence on the matter is kind of a pain.

It probably goes without saying that because I violated some unnamed policy I lost all income accumlated to that point. Which although only about $250ish, would have paid for hosting for the year at the time.

I've heard of other people who've mentioned Google suspending/canceling their AdSense accounts right before payment. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that maybe their business plan is to let anyone display ads for them, but when they reach the payment threshold then get nit-picky with the rules and try to get their account canceled. That's probably not the case, but if it has happened to many people it looks a bit suspicious.

Anyway, I'm not looking for resolution on the matter, I'm just curious if others have had similar experiences. Personally, I've switched to AdBrite with good results, continual payments and no suspensions (though the AdBrite ads sit in the same spot as the AdSense ones used to).

I haven't experienced it personally, but a friend had his account suspended after an influx of clicks. Your account wouldn't have been suspended because you or your wife clicked on the ads. I've clicked my ads by mistake more than once and I've never had so much as an email from Google. They would have just seen the strange spike in clicks and assumed they were invalid.

My friend who had the same problem emailed Google a couple of months later and they allowed him to use the system again, although I don't think he got the money from before his account was suspended.

A friend tried this years ago, he setup some AOL boxes, dial up accounts, got them dialing, got the mouse moving around the screen and clicking on the adverts at pretty random times.
He still got banned as he didnt address the issue with visitors.

To be honest it serves him right

@ Jenny: Hm, interesting. So, maybe it's not a good idea to grow whilst using AdSense. :) I suppose it's possible I had invalid clicks in some other way...there are a couple former site members who aren't friendly and are smart enough to know that lots of clicks will raise flags.

@ DJ: Yeah, there was definitely nothing like the blatant abuse you mentioned, at least not on my part or that I was aware of.

From an advertiser point of view i can tell you google is not hard enough as i would like to see it. Click fraund is normally not detected automatically. You have to check your log files and report them and report again and it takes some while until the get to it.

So if you haven't done some larger scale click fraud (or done it pretty stupid) you might have violated other criterias.

I don't know how google does it (really), but they don't credit you for your clicking on your ads any more, so that's really not the problem, or I wouldn't think so anyways.

Of course, I'm not google, so I couldn't really say what's what here, as always best policy is to contact them.

As far as the "conspiracy theory", my suspicion is that this theory is partly true, and , from a business perspective, it's a smart way to do this.

Google pays people it doesn't think are cheating. That goes without saying. I've received a deposit from them as have countless others.

Those it DOES suspect as cheating, google will ban once they're due payment. Why? Well, again, common sense. Get the most out of the publisher before tossing the account, don't pay anything, and boom, you're there.

From a publisher perspective, AdSense blows. Not only do they not disclose their payouts, but they are , well, quite dodgy at how they actually count clicks. For example, let's say I'm at one of my own sites, and an ad shows up that I'm genuinely interested in. It happens, oh, once every few days. I click on it, policies be damned. Usually, I end up buying something from the customer, signing up for service, or whatever, but do I get CREDIT for that click? Absolutely not! Like I said, dodgy.

Unfortunately for "safe programs", google is all there is. Everything else is pretty much popup, popunder, in between pages, etc. Not good! Yahoo's catching up, but they're not as big yet.