I won´t go any deeper into the details here, I just want to point out that I´ll stay independent from Google Adsense anyway, because there are plenty of other blog monetizing services out there. But feel free to give me some comments, especially if you got banned too. I really would like to know if there were other people having the same “problems” with Google Adsense.

See you later!
Querblogger

Yesterday I cleared my letter-box and found a really big envelope with 6 colored letters on it. It was from Google! So far I never got a mail from Google, so it kept me wondering what it would be. I opened the letter and found a coupon with following phrase on it: “Here is more traffic inside!”.

They actually sent me an Google Adwords coupon worth 50€ (around $73)! I immediately remembered the phrase “Here is more traffic inside!” and thought about the reasons for banning my Adsense account. Hehe, it seems I now know the real reasons for my banned account

For me it seems Google doesn´t like traffic exchanges, so they sent me this Adwords coupon for starting my own advertising campaign to drive traffic to my blog (in a “legal” way). Sure, it must be sheer coincidence, but it´s also kind of a strange thing what happened this weekend. All in all I now have around $73 that I can use for advertising my blog and I´m bery happy about it (Thank you Google team!). I only have to find the right keywords for promoting my blog, let´s see what will happen.

Bye bye!
Querblogger

The reasons for the ban

My first thought was: “What have I done illegally?”. I read the whole mail and they stated that I have generated some illegal clicks/impressions from advertisements that show up on my blog. So they had to ban me from my account, because “click fraud” is against their terms of service.

My next thought was: “I know where those illegal clicks/impressions come from. Linkreferral!”.

Yes that´s right. Linkreferral is a traffic exchange program I joined at the end of October. It generates traffic for my blog if I visit other members site and review them. All in all a really nice and free way for driving traffic to your site/blog. But those programs are against the TOS of Google Adsense! Only “natural” clicks will count legally, but no “sponsored” clicks.

What I will do against this

My answer is that simple: nothing. I won´t do anything against this ban because of the following reasons:

1. At this time traffic is much more important to me than the money earned from Google Adsense. I get around 20 unique visitors each day from Linkreferral and some of them even have a deeper look at my blog. This is by far more important, because building a fellow readership will bring me more benefits for the future.
2. Google Adsense brought me nearly nothing so far, only around $0.30 since starting this blog. I think there are definitely better advertising systems especially for blogs like Blogvertise and that kind. So I´ll keep an eye on new advertising programs like contextual ads or text link ads.
3. I have more space for my blog posts. This will be helpful to my readers, in fact, advertisements can really be annoying sometimes.

So this is my opinion about this ban from Google Adsense. I personally want to promote Linkreferral and traffic exchanges in general anyway, they can bring you a fast start up amount on daily visits to your sites and blogs. But I´ll also warn all my readers who have integrated Google Adsense on their own blogs, be careful with those traffic exchange programs, you may risk a ban from Adsense!

Best regards!
Querblogger