Remember a little while back when I asked what Dragon Mail was? Turns out that it could be some sort of pay-to-surf or pay-to-click program and that is the source of some invalid Adsense clicks on my blog. I just got an email from Google and it reads as follows. This is making me a sad panda.
Hello Michael Kwan,
It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.
Please bear in mind that if we continue to detect invalid clicks or impressions from these services on your ads, we may disable your account to protect our advertisers. In addition, we may adjust your future payments for any days during which invalid clicks occurred in order to properly credit advertisers for any invalid activity.
We understand that you may wish to receive specific information regarding the invalid activity we observed on your account. However, due to the proprietary nature of our algorithm, we cannot disclose any details about how our monitoring technology works or what specifics we found on your account.
As a reminder, any method of generating invalid clicks or impressions is strictly prohibited by our Terms and Conditions and program policies:
https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms?hl=en_US
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_USFor your reference, you can find tips and guidelines for keeping your account in good standing by visiting our Help Center at
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23921&hl=en_US.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
Does anyone know how to block a site from referring traffic your way?
That’s fairly easy to do if you have the ability to edit your .htaccess file, which I can tell you do by your URIs. The only question I would have is whether you need to block traffic coming in from a specific site/IP, or if you need to block traffic coming from all over, but all referred by a specific site? I’m thinking you mean the latter.
This needs to stop. This letter was the first ‘warning’ I’ve seen posted anywhere, but it’s just not fair if they don’t tell you how they are coming to their conclusions. It’s like at anytime they can do whatever they want and it’s within their TOS to do so. No human reps to call either.
What can we do as publishers? Really?
I have a human rep 🙂
But seriously, just do what they say, tell them exactly what steps you are taking and what you have discovered. Keep them in the loop. Unfortunately, if they don’t reply, you won’t know if they believe you or not. You’re pretty lucky that you got a warning. Most that I’ve seen just get a “You are Banned” email.
Michael, try this:
RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://dragon-mail.net/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F,L]
Opps, forgot to mention that the code goes in your .htaccess file in your domain’s root.
Exactly the code I was going to recommend if you stated it is referrals from a specific site that you are trying to block. The only thing I would add is that this must go before the existing WordPress code you will already find in your .htaccess file, as WordPress considers everything after it’s code begins to belong to it and it will modify it.
Also, you may find your .htaccess is set to be unwriteable. If it is read only and you don’t know how to CMOD it, let us know.
The WordPress Rewrite Code shouldn’t have any effect in this case.
You might want to add another RewriteCond for http://www.dragon-mail.net too…
Thanks for all your help guys. Hopefully this htaccess business does the trick and everything goes back to normal.
No problem, have you put the code in, yet? Since going from dragon-mail.net to michaelkwan.com still works. 😛
It seems like the htaccess thing has done the trick, because when I logged into Analytics today, I found no new referrals from dragon-mail, but I seem to be getting a little more traffic from StumbleUpon.
On a side note, if anyone stumbles/diggs this post, you get 1000 brownie points. I’m sure other Adsense publishers would be interested in this story.
Did you add a RewriteCond (just copy the first one) for http://www.dragon-mail.net?