Our Adsense history

dutchbb

Well-known member
It has been quite a rollercoaster...

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It has been awful since the ban but it seems to be recovering now. Perhaps someone finds this interesting or can even post some tips.
 
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It has been quite a rollercoaster...

It has been awful since the ban but it seems to be recovering now. Perhaps someone finds this interesting or can even post some tips.

How did you get your ban lifted, and how did you go about finding all the content that may put you in harm's way with them?

I was booted about 2 years ago, and they mentioned everything from pictures to cursing. Whenever they would send a specific URL I would always erase / edit it within minutes, but then one day they started flagging posts that were 5, 6, 7 years old then just booted me. Grrr. I have done several appeals, all to no avail.
 
How did you get your ban lifted, and how did you go about finding all the content that may put you in harm's way with them?

I was booted about 2 years ago, and they mentioned everything from pictures to cursing. Whenever they would send a specific URL I would always erase / edit it within minutes, but then one day they started flagging posts that were 5, 6, 7 years old then just booted me. Grrr. I have done several appeals, all to no avail.
I know, it's frustrating, but you can succeed.

I kept sending the policy-appeal form, I think I've send it in at least 25 times over the period of one year before they approved. They kept finding violating content, with a forum containing over 8M posts it was almost impossible to review every post. So we hired a vBulletin developer to create a special mod, a gallery that could show every hotlinked picture existing in the database (costs $1000). I could then quickly scan thousands of pages with hotlinked images. It still took weeks to scan every image and remove the violating ones, but it did the job. Then the Google guys found erotic youtube videos so we had to remove them as well. I just disabled the mod that transformed youtube links to embedded video (users were not happy). Still not satisfied, they replied we needed to remove any discussion about sex or anything related to the topic. Took another few weeks to alter the database to remove any instance of f*** and "sex". Then they found some blasphemy in several posts, turns out that is also against their policy. I was almost ready to throw in the towel at that point. Our members didn't like it when I told them they could no longer post any erotica in pictures or text, swearing, and blasphemy. But after a good search and a final appeal they could not find anything anymore and had no choice but to reapprove our forum to Adsense.

All I can recommend is, when they have found something and disabled ads, make sure you do a very good search and clean everything before appealing.
 
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You will get more stable results once you earn several thousands each month. In regions of around $100 / month it always will be a roller coaster due to the way Google AdSense works. We see this too at our smaller sites.
 
You will get more stable results once you earn several thousands each month. In regions of around $100 / month it always will be a roller coaster due to the way Google AdSense works. We see this too at our smaller sites.
During the months before the ban, Adsense brought in between €2-3K a month, it looked like going to a steady €100/day. After re-approval it went down to €30/day or so. Currently still not at €50/day. Since they changed the text ads to look more like ads instead of content, clicks are way down. Also traffic has not fully recovered since the domain change. I'll post an update here in a year or so.
 
Got banned too, for some sexy photos... I tried to appeal and then I gave up... after some months I retry deleting more photos and they accepted
The problem with the ban is that they give you only few info an only one URL... then they say "but probably this problem is in other pages too" !!! :eek:


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Here's ours

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The seasonal spikes (Jan and Aug) are because we're a football forum and they relate to the transfer window.

The big drop is when XF 1.2 came out and we moved to a responsive design.

The short flat period is a temporary ban for adult content (which happened over Christmas so was difficult to deal with).
 
The big drop is when XF 1.2 came out and we moved to a responsive design.
it seam that you moved to responsive design after the seasonal spike, right?
the only difference I see are the spike that after 1.2 got lower than the the previous years... is traffic changed after that? impressions went down to or only clicks?
 
Has anyone found that text only ads bring in more revenue? I earn a little more revenue by allowing both text and image ads.
 
The easiest way to handle this kind of photo issue is to temporarily change permissions so guests cannot see images, only members. That will buy you time to find the offending ones and will make Google happy fast since they only view the site as a guest.


Took another few weeks to alter the database to remove any instance of f*** and "sex".

Why didn't you just use a replacement variable for the words? Would have taken you 5 minutes to remove those words.
 
the only difference I see are the spike that after 1.2 got lower than the the previous years... is traffic changed after that? impressions went down to or only clicks?

Neither. If anything they've increased. Just mobile ads pay FAR less.
 
The easiest way to handle this kind of photo issue is to temporarily change permissions so guests cannot see images, only members. That will buy you time to find the offending ones and will make Google happy fast since they only view the site as a guest.

Ours was one random one in a huge thread that was something like 6 years old and had got missed at the time.
 
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Great.

Hey you edited out the Y axis !
I saw it this morning.

:)
Correct, I know the TOS allows showing gross income, but I wasn't sure about this one, better safe than sorry...

Has anyone found that text only ads bring in more revenue? I earn a little more revenue by allowing both text and image ads.
Allowing both simply increases the bidders, that's always a good thing. Display-ads generally generate more clicks, though text ads can work well in some locations like right within content.

The easiest way to handle this kind of photo issue is to temporarily change permissions so guests cannot see images, only members. That will buy you time to find the offending ones and will make Google happy fast since they only view the site as a guest.
Actually we tried this, Google then asked for a login so they could check.

Why didn't you just use a replacement variable for the words? Would have taken you 5 minutes to remove those words.
Because I knew we were going to move to XF later on and it wouldn't be imported, better to clean it in the actual data.
 
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