A few weeks ago, I emailed Adsense support to ask about an idea I had for displaying an Adsense search box on my site. In response to my inquiry, I received an email from an Adsense rep informing me that my free term paper website did not comply with the Adsense program policy. After exchange a number of emails with customer support reps, they informed me that they had “exercise editorial discretion†and determined that my site was not a good fit for Adsense.
The situation is mind boggling to me. I have been running Adsense on the site since April of 2003 without any problems. I was one of the beta testers for Adsense because I was working with the company Google acquired to get the foundation technology for Adsense.
Banning my site is also confusing because on the AdWords side of the house, Google allows term paper related advertisers. A Google search for term papers shows at least 50 AdWords advertisers. When I pointed this out to the AdSense customer support rep, I was told that AdWords is a separate program and that it has a separate policy.
Despite my efforts to point out the inconsistencies in my banning, I could not get the ban reversed. In the next few weeks, I will be trying out a number of replacement programs, and I will post my reviews of the programs here. I plan on testing YPN, Adbrite, Clicksor, Text Link Ads, and others.
I would be very interested in hearing from anyone with similar experiences or good ideas for Adsense alternatives.
Related Posts
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So, just your site was banned, or was your entire account banned?
I don’t blame them if they just banned the site. Helping students cheat in school is not an honest endeavor.
But maybe it would have been ok if you characterized your site as something other than a “free term paper website”. How about just a resource for term-paper related material.
Just my site was banned. I spent a lot of time explaining that the site is an educational resource site meant to provide examples to students, but this argument was ineffective.
If Google was so concerned about termpaper related material, I would expect them to also ban termpaper advertisers from AdWords, but this has not been the case.
This is one of the things that scares me about getting involved with the Adsense program. They can decide at anytime to make the “editorial” decision to ban you from the program..
It is too much of a power trip for me, and I am looking for alternatives to the program as well. I have made no decision as to what type of adsense alternative would work best on my site, but your reviews of Adbrite, and YPN, have given me a head start.
Since you are testing, I have a list of Adsense alternatives for your consideration. You may already be familiar with it, but I present here for your perusal in case you didn’t.
The list is from ThreadWatch.org
Good List of Adsense Alternatives
http://www.threadwatch.org/resources/advertising/contextual/adsense/alternatives
I know that you can’t test everything, but if you want to target some of them, or maybe even all of them, it would be nice to experiement.
Just a thought..
Keep up the good work, and keep sharing your marketing knowledge. I do appreciate it..
Regards..
Robert..
[...] few months ago, I found out the hard way that Google was going to ban term paper related websites. In the Adsense terms and conditions [...]
It seems like the “I’ve been screwed by google†club just keeps growing and growing at an alarming rate. That is why I created the http://www.googlehorrorstories.net web site. It is a place where people can share their stories about how google screwed them over. It is my hope that this will effect positive change at Google.
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Have you tried WidgetBucks? I’ve been earning almost twice as much with WidgetBucks compared to AdSense. Plus, the ads are optimized for WordPress, Blogger, and even TypePad. Check out this WidgetBucks review for some more info.