“My Google Adsense account is disabled. What should I do?” This is an email I recently received from one of the members in my Adsense membership program.

Frankly, this email is a wake up call to me. I’ve heard of people’s account got disabled, but I haven’t had any close friend whose account has been disabled.

The reason why her account is disabled is unknown. She didn’t click her own ads. The only possibility, she confessed, is that one of her neglected blogs posted junk info. But the site receives practically no traffic and zero click through. Does that justify an account suspension?

Ignorance can cause your Adsense account disabled

We know the general rule of Adsense. Basically, an Adsense website should be content rich and provide values to the visitors. This is the rule that I’ve been playing with all this while and I believe I’m pretty safe.

But after hearing this sad news, I start to think if there is anything else I need to be cautious about. It is possible that your ignorance (or should I say negligence) may cause your Adsense account disabled.

Here are some of the issues I can think of:

1) Do you have a ‘forgotten’ junk site with your Adsense ad in it?

It could be a Blogger blog that you created years ago. You probably followed the advice of some “black hat” marketers to auto-post junk info into the blog and profit from Adsense. This is a time bomb. Make sure that you remove those ads now.

2) Have you been sabotaged?

Google says that you can’t click your own ad or ask other people to click on your ad. This means if you offended me, I can sabotage you by going to your Adsense website and mass-click your ads until your Adsense account is suspended!

Is it possible? One word, yes!

This is stupid, I know, but it can happen. Here’s what Google say about how to prevent sabotage.

As you can see, the answer they give is just a diplomatic answer. It just tell you one thing, that is, you can be sabotaged.

If you have hundreds of websites, how on earth are you going to monitor each of the traffic log for suspicious activity?

If your website is suspended due to fraudulent clicks, do you think Google will believe you that someone actually sabotage you? Or they will think you actually get someone to inflate the clicks so as to help you earn more money?

I have yet to have a solution to this problem. All I can say is if you ever experience the following scenarios, report to Google immediately. If you file a report with them before they catch you, you are in a better position to prove to them that you’ve been sabotaged.

The scenarios include:

- You experience an extremely high CTR.

If you have a CTR of 500%, it means for every page loaded from your website, a visitor actually clicks 5 ads. This is an obvious sign that you’ve been sabotaged.

- You experience a sudden surge in your Adsense income on a particular website.

There is no absolute amount for the surge. If your website has been earning $1 a day and suddenly it increases to $10 and you didn’t do anything special, you probably want to check out the traffic log and report to Google if necessary.

3) Is your advertising media reliable?

If you advertise your Adsense website, be sure that you know the source of the traffic and that the advertising media is reliable.

For example, you may go to a forum or Ebay to buy 100000 visitors and you drive the traffic to your Adsense website. Many of these cheap traffic services actually use pop-under technology and if Google happens to know it, you are in deep soup.

Talking about advertising media, please do not advertise your Adsense websites on LeadsLeap.com. It’s for your own good. Although LeadsLeap is not a click-exchange program, it does have some elements of click-exchange. Click-exchange traffic is forbidden for Adsense. To play safe, I wouldn’t advertise my Adsense website via LeadsLeap. Frankly, you won’t get much click-through anyway. Instead, those ad will make your ad look unprofessional. I never put Adsense ads in my squeeze page or sales page.

4) Are you keeping up-to-date with Google policy?

Google may change their Adsense policy from time to time. Things that you do today may be violating their rules tomorrow.

For example, in 2006, all the gurus asked you to put a picture beside your Adsense ad to boost click through. But in 2007, Google added to its policy that images are not allowed alongside Adsense ads.

If you have any website built in 2006 with images beside the ads, be sure that you’ve removed those images by now.

5) Do you have other self-feeding ads on your website?

Besides Adsense ads, you may insert other advertising feeds such as those that automatically generate a list of items sold at Amazon or Ebay, or you may sell text links on your website. This is usually not much of a problem if the program that you use is reliable. But some advertising or link selling programs allow adult contents and if you are not careful, you may end up having porn ads on your website!

What should I do if my account is disabled?

If your account is already disabled, you can’t register another Adsense account using your name. However, there are 2 alternatives I can think of:

1) Open another account under a business entity.

You can set up a business entity and register another Adsense account. The advantage is you are still in full control of your Adsense account. The disadvantage is you will have to open a business account with your local bank in order to bank in the money. Depending on the bank, a substantial minimum deposit may be necessary. In Singapore, it’s $10k.

2) Use your relative’s account.

You can open another account under your spouse’s name or someone you trust. The disadvantage is the cheque will be issued to another person’s name and you have to treat that person well or…..

In both options, the best is to use a different mailing address. If it’s under the same mailing address, Google will pay special attention to the activity in that account.

Actually, not all are lost.

Once you have another account, you can put the id back to your existing sites. Your account may have been banned, but your site has not. But this time, make sure you do things right. Also, make sure that you do not put it on sites that violate Google policy or you’ll risk your account being banned again.

Some final words……

Last but not least, I want to say that I still love Google Adsense. The income is 100% passive. There is no need to handle any customer support or do any updating work for changes in affiliate programs. As long as you keep your hat ‘white’ and don’t make ignorant mistakes like those I’ve suggested above, you shouldn’t worry too much about having your Google Adsense account disabled.