We have been signed up to Adsense for several years but not used it much at all. Recently we decided we would try to use Adsense to monetize some new original content websites we are planning on creating - which we expect would attract much greater traffic levels and (hopefully) produce far more revenue.

We wrote a few articles as an experiment and published them online along with some Adsense ads. Shortly thereafter we received what we now understand is the standard dreaded email from Adsense telling us that our account had been disabled for posing "a risk" to Adsense advertisers. No further details were provided.

We don't know for sure why this happened since no reason was given to us other than this generic risk statement. But the only thing we can imagine being responsible is that one of our people clicked on a few of our own ads when we were setting up our webpages to see what kind of advertisers we were being linked to. We later realized that there is an Adsense Preview tool to accomplish this without violating the Adwords TOS section about webmasters clicking on their own ads. However, the amount of such clicks would have been very small - maybe 10-20 clicks in total. That would probably have produced less than $10 or so in revenue. We were certainly not intending to create any revenue stream by clicking on our own ads.

We appealed the account disablement with the appeals form that Google has for this purpose, explaining the above and making it clear that in future we would be ***extremely*** careful not to click on our ads for any purpose. After a few days we received a reply which just stated that the disablement would remain in effect because our account was still considered to be a risk to Google advertisers. After that, all further communications we sent were not replied to.

I would really appreciate it if anybody might be able to give us some advice about hopefully getting Google to reconsider. We are ethical people and we absolutely do not pose any "risk" to anyone. We obviously have no intentions of ever clicking on our own ads again, and the few clicks we made were an honest mistake, not malice. We may currently be "small fry" (and hence no big loss) as far as Adsense is concerned because so far we almost never used it, but we do honestly believe we could do much more with Adsense in future if given another chance.

Many thanks for any help.

LV

[edited by: La_Valette at 11:23 pm (utc) on Dec. 5, 2008]