Policy Violations

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Policy Violations

csdude55

5:00 pm on Mar 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

I don't know what's up, but for the last several months Google has just been watching my user-driven site like a hawk. I'm constantly getting "violation" reports, and most of them are wrong.

Today's violation was in the classifieds category for clothing. Someone had posted a photo of a mannequin wearing a swimsuit, and apparently Google thought it was "Adult: sexual content".

This is seriously happening almost every day; different reports, different violations, but rarely an actual violation so I'm constantly having to request a review. They're not "site violations" and Adsense says that they don't have to be fixed, but the pages aren't showing ads.

I'm losing money, my average RPM is way down, and I'm worried that my account is in jeopardy, even though I've done nothing wrong.

Is everyone having this issue, or am I just being particularly scrutinized for some reason?

lammert

5:08 pm on Mar 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

You might have been reported manually a few times which caused the threshold for automatic violation scans to lower. Or all these reports were manual by a competitor in hopes that Google will take down your AdSense account.

Dimitri

5:43 pm on Mar 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

Policy is a bit less strict today, than it was in the past. However, in the past, I read so many stories, that I took drastic measures, to be sure not to have problems. I don't let anyone post photos / images. For plenty of reasons.

First of all, in 99.9% of cases, posters do not own the rights of the image, and so it can be a copyright infringement at some point.

Secondly, because of the way Adsense (or others) can produce false positive, when automatically testing images. You know, for example, an image featuring too much "skin-like-tones", might be interpreted by a software as nudity, even if it's a photo of sand dunes.

CommandDork

6:42 pm on Mar 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

I think its the Adsense "AI" - it's both overly sensitive and dumb at the same time. I get policy violation reports every other day now, having to take the time to review it and submit for a manual review.

csdude55

7:10 pm on Mar 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

@Dimitri... man, one time I got a policy violation because someone had posted a link to another website that had an image of the top of a man's butt crack taken from a G-rated Disney movie. Ironically, that website had Google ads on it, but somehow I was in violation by providing a link to it.

@CommandDork, I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone in this, anyway. Have you noticed a drop in RPM since the excessive violations began? Mine is down 18% on paper, but that doesn't consider the money lost from not having ads on the pages they're flagging.

vordmeister

7:35 pm on Mar 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

If anyone else has trouble seeing policy notifications try the Chrome browser if you get the 'our engineers are looking at it' message.

Seems only pages get blocked. I run a metalworking site and it seems many of our metalworking words have been misappropriated.

tangor

8:14 pm on Mar 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

Sadly, this appears to be the new normal while the AI continues to "learn". One can only keep requesting reviews as there doesn't seem to be any other method for addressing the issue.