'nuff said

Sorry I have to vent. And what the hell, it is my blog isn't it? I doubt anybody is reading. If you are, this isn't for you. That is, unless you are considering signing up for Adsense and stumble on this inadvertently. Signing up may not be worth the effort to you.

I got a succinct letter the other day from Google saying that my adsense account was being canceled due to click fraud. Thing is... I don't click on my own ads. I did once or twice, but that was long ago when I was setting up my accounts and testing the site/s. Literally, once or twice. I didn't know any better. They sent me a nice warning and I haven't done it since. I do look at my site to make sure it is working. AND I do read my RSS feeds here.

However... This site didn't make any revenue anyway. (At least not for me...) I just used it to test ad placement code and to write stupid stories like this one, but about EVs. The real page views and ad clicks were happening on a couple of other sites that I host/admin with my EV buddies from the midwest. I also admin our local EV site and a couple of other interrelated sites. Most of them small. I guess you guys who have been digging through looking for info and following the links reading have somehow inadvertently set off some alarms at Google HQ. Oh well.

Anyway, they unceremoniously kicked me out and grabbed the revenue that they said had been improperly acquired. An entire month's worth. They were nice though... They did offer me the opportunity to prove my innocence. How the Holy F*ck do I do that? Turns out I have a black box recorder that records my every move so I have a complete log of my and all of my friends and family's activities over the past year. "Just ask me, I can show that I was definitely NOT clicking on adsense links during that time. I was looking at pr0n and I don't even want to say what my brother was up to. See, its in the recorder!" I am REALLY glad our courts don't work this way. I could see that really being frustrating. I would have expected the geniuses at Google to have something better up their sleeves than this. I wanted a full on virtual court. Nah, that would be too complex. Too polished and smooth. They are engineers after all. Just an old fashioned, unadulterated, hard edged search page corn cob reaming. They even followed the "trail" to my wife's Google account and sent her a cancellation notice on an Adsense account that she never managed to figure out how to use! Gotta hand it to them for being thorough.

Geeze. I was just trying to get a few sheckles for the work I put into providing those sites and maybe pay some hosting fees. It isn't that big a deal. I felt kinda weird displaying ads anyway. Perhaps I will just put up a donation page instead. Or not. I doubt those work either. I'm not doing this for that anyway.

I understand that they are getting a lot of heat from their advertisers about invalid clicks. That doesn't mean that Google Adsense doesn't suck balls though. If they get too arbitrary, they will start loosing publishers. Some of them might even bitch about it and let others know what is going on...

Now back to building my electric vehicles. This is too frustrating.