Good Afternoon Folks!!
I will be working on a major post for next week. It is a post to pay close attention to. The sites I had closed were created by different companies. About ten sites, 3 different companies that produced them. I paid TENS of thousands of dollars for them. Three were not minisites. One site I had online for 9 years. BE ON NOTICE! No warning whatsoever from Google. No appeal. No discussion. No nothing. They just pulled the plug, denied access to my account and you may be next. No biggie to me it's chump change. But what if YOU have thousands of sites, tens of thousands? More? No recourse whatsoever. NONE!
Rick Schwartz
BullS
Go kick their Google A+ss….I will be supporting you!!
Product Domains
Needless to say Google isn’t very transparent
Robbie
Not noticed anything yet but you have just got me going through all of my sites checking to see if this is happening.
I have heard of people before being closed down and there was a story a while back, either Mike (TheDomains.com) or Andrew on (DNW.com) cover something about someone who had there account closed but took Google to court and Im sure he won.
Rob
Jay
When PPC revenue started to slide I said guess I need to sell more domains or make the domains I have produce more income, I choose to give it a shot at producing my own affiliate websites as I wanted everything on my own servers, I have 25 of them created so far and they are working quite well, main income comes from ebay, then amazon, adsense is on them but I debate taking it off as the ebay income just kills them, point being don’t rely on 1 source being google or yahoo in parking, when you step into affiliate marketing you can go ebay, amazon, adsense, cj.com, linkshare.com etc… so nobody can make you bow to their rules, if you own the keyword rich type in generic domains they want your traffic so if 1 affiliate plays games there will be another who wont.
Mike
As I’ve been saying for years, adsense is not the best solution when it comes to monetization.. It is one option, which I recommend to use as a back-fill ad inventory to make some $$ right from the start while you search for something that converts better and pays more.. Most people unfortunately lose interest fast when it comes to development and settle for the few pennies here and there that Google throws them.
The only people who make the big bucks off of adsense is the genius affiliate marketers who pick up all this traffic on the cheap and Google who keeps a huge rev share ;)
Robbie
Here is the article from DNW.com – http://domainnamewire.com/2009/06/10/publisher-who-sued-google-adsense-loses-appeal/
Looks like he won then lost it on appeal
Might be worth a read.
Aron
I wouldnt care if they denied ads to certain sites, but to close an account… that’s rough.
It happens often with no explanation, no”just do this to ge re-instated”… no nothing.
none
I noticed Name Administration is experimenting with LinkBox. We need to get behind this to make a critical mass of domains, pageviews etc and create a network effect.
Please let me know your thoughts.
Rosco
I had is happen a year ago. I manage to get a response from them but didn’t change the anything. Its a pretty stink feeling when it happens. They have too much power. Not even a warning!
Alan
Shut them down I say. If all do with a domain is put 3 pages of content and some ads there is little value to the site anyway.
Adsense is a revenue piece to compliment content – too many people build sites for ads then they get 3 pages deep and say .. I have no idea what to do.
Whoever didn’t see this coming is once again .. not a businessman but just person who owns a domain name.
David J Castello
Reason #1065 for domainers to build their own advertising roster. We just signed ONE client last week to be on ONE of our sites for $7500 a month. Google who?
Tia Wood
“Reason #1065 for domainers to build their own advertising roster. We just signed ONE client last week to be on ONE of our sites for $7500 a month. Google who?”
Yes! I love that attitude, David.
Alan
David,
If only more people did what you guys do no one would care about these posts.
Prediction – 2015 … most of todays domain owners will still be complaining.
congrats on the deal.
Alan
Kevin
It takes a lot of work and persistence, but like David illustrated, a single ad deal is all you need on each site and you can make more money with 1 company directly than you would collecting pennies a click for several years through any of the ad networks out there.
UFO
I’m cashing in my Adsense now, there’s a pretty penny in it so I don’t want any problems, the only reason I have been holding out is that the STG has been so dire against the USD.
Now, I said back in June when the DOW was 8300 that I thought it would make 10000 by year end. Well, I might be just right…
Kevin
And also what David said is not just a fluke. Companies will pay you lots of money if you can deliver the audience they want no matter if you have a site with 10,000 people a day or a 100 a day. As long as you can deliver targeted prospects they’ll pay you well.
I have one friend who has built a really well done niche site on a 2 word domain. Took him 5 years to grow it. From that single site he’s bringing in over $200,000 a year now in ad deals.
Andrea Mignolo
@Rick Schwartz
This is a common problem… I invested in minisites too, so please post other details:
– Privacy Policy
– CTR
– Number of AdSense ads on each page
etc…
Gustavo Volcan
Google did not pay me thousands of dollars from my adsense account here in Brazil. They tell you to wait for someking of letter with a numeber you put into a field inside of your account so after that they can pay you. My site generated thousands of dollars and their maginc letter never arrived even asking them to resend 4 times to diferent addresses. Do not rely on google, they steal.
Steve
@Rick,
This will probably be a blessing in disguise. Do what David and Michael are doing and forget about goog. You could use google to see who is paying for advertising on their system and approach those advertisers directly.
Best.
Internetual
you’re learning what most of us knew a long time ago, google can pull the plug anytime they like. maybe you didnt have a disclaimer, or terms or whatever else they sneak into their terms or change from time to time. and they keep all the money and suspend your account. google are fraudsters on a global scale. you dont need them. dont rely on them and you wont miss them. i advertise my own sites on all my sites, and take paid advertising when approached. this is the way to go imho
even parking sucks to hell. develop or have sales pages imo. sack the ppc companies and google.
also,ive seen many of your sites rick and have to say im amazed you paid tens of thousands for them, you should have sacked your developers years ago.
no offence but all your sites look terrible lol, but you have great names. theres a lot of cheap , great talent on the forums, find it and use it imho.
hope you feel you can post this lol
cheers
Stephen Douglas
Thanks for the heads up, Rick.
The word in the busted up subways is that Google is advancing their own minisite generation tools, what with their blog sites already heavily established.
My recommendation, as always…
CPA or your own products, especially ebooks, and DIRECT LINK RENTALS. See Linkthis.com and Sendori.com
Patricia Kaehler
Frank’s got something about ready that will be a nice alternative…
GD might offer something soon…
and I wouldn’t count out Parked.com — making a WP plugin
someone with VISION either already has something in the works… or will be jumping on it… too much money to be made for it to go by the wayside…
~Patricia – DomainBELL
Huw Williams
Yes I’m afraid so, the mighty Goog are on a mission to close/shut down targeted individuals and companies who they feel are contradicting Google’s advertising policies”their customers” and for Goog more importantly, their expectations for the future of the internet – as we speak!
As always they have their own”vested interests” in the running of this ship, and the agenda is to clear the ice regardless of who’s setup shop in the meantime – even if they profit Google..
I don’t mind saying this, but I’ve already lost mine because of a few traffic spikes which they considered as spam traffic – instant termination without any consideration, and they owed me thousands!
Well, FK you Google, because your great name and stance is already diminishing – it’s already become the beginning of the end IMO, and Bing”hate to say it but God Bless MS” may just give you a run for your billions!
For the record – I DON’T USE GOOGLE ANY MORE – I’m no longer reliant on them for my business interests, I’m making good money from the alternatives and it’s most”definitely” more than I would make via G!
We all hate dictatorship on this side of the fence – don’t we!
Michael Sumner
Did you speak with Google and they said they closed your Adsense because you put it on mini sites? Otherwise your title is misleading.
There are a million and one reasons why your Adsense account could have been closed. Maybe your mini site (or full scale) developer didn’t have an Adsense-compliant Privacy Policy on every site. Maybe he used more Adsense units than the TOS allows. Maybe he put headings over the ads to”Click Here”. Maybe you got a lot of sketchy traffic somehow. Maybe someone clickbombed you. Maybe you had them on a site that Adsense doesn’t agree with, like gambling, adult, etc. etc. etc.
To say Google is going after mini sites is silly, especially when there’s so many different reasons you could have been shut down. If a few of your sites happened to be about credit cards, would you shout”Google is shutting down credit card sites” from the hilltops?
We have several clients who developed 60-75 mini sites, all with Adsense, and none have had problems.
I can’t imagine your 7 were the first on Google’s kill list and they’re on a mission to destroy mini sites. It’s much more likely one or more of your sites violated their TOS in some way, or the quality of your traffic/clicks was not beyond reproach.
I know you like to shake things up, and I have nothing but respect for you… but please don’t shout”fire” in a crowded theater when there is no fire.
Rick Schwartz
Michael,
First of all I was never notified the reason until days after the account was closed.
The question I ask is legit. Take the following line from the email from Google to be an example:
“It is important for a site displaying AdSense to offer significant value
to the user by providing unique and relevant content”
“Unique and Relevant”…..that would disqualify many if not most of the minisites being made today. It would disqualify a lot of full blown sites if you ask me with all the feeds and such.
So I think minisite developers have to pay particular attention to this don’t you? Do you think I am the first or the last to be shut down?
And yes, this puts in question the future of the minisite. Especially those developing in bulk.
netmeg
This past week AdSense booted out a lot of site owners; the one thing they all seem to have in common is a lot of syndicated content. I haven’t seen your sites, so I don’t know if they come under that description.
They have several different ‘canned’ letters that they use – this is the first time I’ve seen this particular one (and I’ve seen them all over everywhere this week) I know at least a half dozen WhyPark customers who were using AdSense who got pulled.
It’s still shaking out but I don’t believe they’re going after mini-sites (heck most of my 100 or so sites are less than 5 pages and G just offered to assign me a specialist to help them earn more – which is a scary thought) but I do think they’re going after syndicated content or republished articles.
There’s a lot going in the AdWords/AdSense world just now. Google is really putting out a huge push to attract new advertisers (as a GAP they used to give me five or six vouchers with which to tempt new business, and this time they sent *twenty*) AdSense just recently announced they’d be serving 3rd party display ads (non Google) and they’re also finally doing something with Doubleclick. I think all these things have to be related, including new guidelines for publishers – they’re just all coming out too close together.
My .02.
Jeff Aikman
My Google Adsense was disabled as well on Thursday. Their reasoning was the content not being relevant. I was averaging $200 a day in Adsense revenue so for me it’s a $72,000 a year hit! Here’s a good question when google ban an account are the domains that were related to that account banned for life as well? If so, these sites can’t even be resold to any other end user that might even think of Adsense being in the equation. Thank goodness my domain names were not all Adsense reliant and I have a number of domains that Adsense was never on.
netmeg
Yes, the domains are likely banned for life.
If you buy one, and you already have other sites with a good history with AdSense, you *might* be able to persuade AdSense to let you run ads on it if it’s an entirely different site – but I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.
reader
Pay a commission to a Google Adsense employee, you can get your account back
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1403930
Jezza
Same here…they pulled the plug early 2008. Like you, no warning nothing. No explanation. They just say that they suddenly don’t like the business model.
I’ve met countless rep on tradeshows…which”sympathize” by not understanding the”no warning policy”…but things stay there.
Googleooo
I think a few class action lawsuits would work.
I’m sick of the google giant.
Here are some ideas. #1 create a no-index database (maybe even a law like the no-call database). Notify google in writing that all websites in this publiclly accesbile databse shall not be indexed by google. Thus shutting them out of domains as people decide they don’t like google. Google violates it, masssive suit.
Another idea is. We really need a indexing based website that can compete. Bing and Yahoo still suck when it comes to results. I would instantly start pushing the use of another engine if I found one that performed as well or better than google.
Mike Arrington
Welcome to 2004. This has been going on for half a decade already.
MAGOOgle
One thing I am certain of is that there is some breach in TOS that prompted them to take action. The problem is you get no notification in advance.
You can not argue if the information they are using against you is legit or your fault. You have no opportunity to make any corrections to any problems if they are your fault or not.
I got the same from them while using godaddy parking which uses google. I was unable to contact anyone as to why all of my sites were being closed out one at a time over months before I noticed.
I now use Parked.com for any parking of domains as they use Yahoo. I have a adsense account with adds on over 30 domains but I have planed to convert them to something else when opportunity arises.
I have herd this story many times in the last year or two and figure I will be canceled without warning sometime and I do obey the rules but I can not be responsible for someone posting bad links to any of my hosted or parked pages.
This is what happened to some of my parked pages that I found when I started looking for possibilities and the biggest traffic was from a link to my now parked domain was created before I bought the domain. Not my fault but it does not matter, its against the rules for parking and there are many little rules like this with adsense that I doubt everyone is in compliance with.
So it is a matter of importance that you have a ability to have advance notice and a chance to defend yourself and know what you are defending yourself against.
Getting clicks across any or many accounts from the same ip will do it and this can be done by folks with intent to create the cancellation.
Michelle
I have taken my adsense off whypark for the moment after reading this and look forward to your major post as to what has happened.
Lucy
RW – Name the sites. Let’s see the quality of your great minisites. If the King has the ballz.
Peter Ejtel
Our original business model at SharedReviews was to collect product review content and syndicate it out to parked pages for a fee. We realized that the search engines, Google included, just won’t give the same weight to duplicate content (content that appears on any other site) as they do to relevant unique content. This is why we’ve been working on our Content Bounty service which offers 100% unique articles custom created on any topic for a per word fee. With 14k+ North American authors on our site, we’ve been Alpha testing and the results have been extremely promising for the domain owners who are developing with the unique relevant content purchased through the service.
Although we are still going to offer syndication of our product review content, we no longer plan to charge any fees, in fact we are going to share 50% of any revenue generated on our site from the back-link with the domain owner so that the syndicated content becomes an incremental monetization vehicle itself.
chandan
any updates with this ?