Maybe the "invalid click" email is just a template for a multitude of reasons why they ban people. Maybe this was just a case of a dead account that wasn't used for too long. Who knows...

I was worried once... but when I check those usual posts on other forums ("I was banned and did nothing"), in the end, 95% of the time we end up learning of a valid reason why the account was banned and they did do something. That or the site pretty much suck in so many ways.

I don't worry as much anymore. Especially with the recent list of valid web sites per account where clicks are counted.

If true, it definitely sounds scary. But that is a big IF...

Just to play Devil's Advocate, how do you know for sure the poster was legit? Also, even though he didn't have a site (which is hard to believe), he could have posted his AdSense code on someone else's site.

Regardless of the subject matter, innocuous harmless sites are not immune to click attacks or other rules violations.

As to the site that doesn't exist, I went to the AdSense Help Forum and just read the post. The domain listed was just registered on 4/5/08 and as indicated, there is no such website. It would have never been approved for AdSense. This guy is not telling the full story.

From the whois the domain was only made on Creation Date: 05-apr-2008

I guess it must be a form letter but that hardly helps the situation when the account was given on a nonexistent site.

edit: Why would he contact us about being banned if he never had an account? I think he's legit.

You're too trusting, netchicken1. No telling what his motive is but one thing is for sure, he's not telling the whole story. We know for sure that Google does not approve AdSense applications for sites that bring up a 404.

As for the mommies and children site, if any of it is designed specifically for the kids to play, then I could see that site being a threat to advertisers. The kids don't buy.

There is something extremely fishy about the empty domain story. The person has an account already and they own the domain but claim to never have put any adsense code on it or even put up the site. The funny thing is that there is a copy of it in Google's cache. Oops. It's from April 1, while the domain was registered on April 5, so it seems like it must have been a domain transfer, not even an expired domain.

Just a thought here: he may have had a Blogger/Blogspot site and got an account that way.

This reminds of one careless thing, and I'll mention it in case there are others who this shoe fits:

I've got some pretty sorry pages still out there from when I was just learning about AS, and hadn't really got my act together yet. I've left them up.. make a couple bucks a day off them.

Since then, I've worked things out with different niches, fine tuned and working splendidly.

Reminder to myself: don't get canned over some sloppy old stuff you really don't care about. Fix them or dump them.

We have moved large part of impressions to TribalFusion, but our adsense portion still makes several thousands a month. We have many subdomains, and all content is user-generated. The site is a social network, and it is heavily moderated, both by users and by us.

Last week we received an email that one of the subdomains got banned for "adult Content". The email containd a threat that in the case of another violation, the whole account will be closed. We have TOS strictly prohibiting user-posted Adult Content, and our moderation mechanisms are very effective in removing it. When we checked immediately after receiving the email, there was no adult content whatsoever on that subdomain. We moved that subdomain to TribalFusion, and wrote a polite explanation to Google, with links to our TOS and explanation of our moderation mechanisms.

Next day we received a reply, thanking ofr the explanation, stating that that subdomain has been reinstated.

Sounds like Google is having a campaign to purge publisher base.

dibbern2, same here. Good call. Not that my old pages are a major problem, but they aren't up to par with what I've done more recently. Also, I haven't accepted the new TOS yet because I need to go back and make sure those old pages comply with the changes.

I've never received one, but IIRC the invalid clicks email doesn't tell you where the clicks came from, so they may not have been from this domain at all. If you're suggesting that this guy was banned without ever generating a single impression or click, that seems unlikely to me. Unless Google are using a random number generator to terrorize publishers, SOMETHING must have caused him to receive that email.

Aside from a pure goofup on Google's part, the only other explanation I can think of is that the domain was previously banned from AdSense. If so, and if the owner acquired it in an arm's-length transaction, then maybe he can explain the situation to Google and get reinstated.