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Comment by misterjangles | Hacker News Reader

It's frightening that this would happen to a company that actually has a relationship with google in as much as having an account rep. Those of us nobodys who are just running generic ads with no personal contact would have no recourse at all.

I will say though, in every one of these cases there is always a little something odd. You never read about this happening without some small thing that was wonky about the setup. In this case there's a mention of the personal site without any details of what that is. I'd be curious to know what that was.

Even still, it sounds like a gross over-reaction.

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I'm the guy behind Hatchlings.

The site referenced was a small content site I made to drive Amazon referrals for Guitar Hero 4 pre-orders. It was SEO'd and at the top of the search results for "Guitar Hero 4" at the time so it generated quite a bit in affiliate revenue but almost nothing in terms of Adsense.

They never told me what was wrong with it but if I had to make a guess it might have been flagged as a "Made for Adsense" site since it was pretty light on content. And as mentioned I removed the ads from it without as much as a rebuttal.

It was a no-brainer since it was so small-time compared to Hatchlings.

Did you ever get the sense that they did this because they are planning to release a competing product?

No but Google Plus was released only a couple of months after this ordeal started. We would have loved to have been a part of the launch of their platform.

Even if the "personal site" is kinkybattledungeonsandfoodfights.com, any account holder has the right to know what they did wrong.

That policy is not compatible with keeping the seedier side of the internet in the dark about the algorithms used, which is why Google doesn't do that. (You can disagree with this, obviously, but Google does have its reasons.)

Sorry, can you explain a little more about this? How would e-mailing the account holder and telling them what they did wrong reveal the structure of the algorithm?

If you're trying to scam Google (e.g. via click fraud), being told exactly how you were detected is rather useful if you want to be more successful next time.

But the user here is not asking for their detection methods. Just a notice that something was detected at all would suffice I think.

Then the user can at least say "Ops, busted!" or "Damn somebody is sabotaging my Adsense" and either do something to fix it or deactivate his/her account.

It's especially curious that no such notice was given considering that he was in pretty regular contact with an account representative.

The problem is that they don't have any rights. Google makes the rules for Adsense and you need to follow them. You could try to sue them in court, but do you really want to spend thousands of dollars and waste all kinds of time?

Something similar happened to me with Amazon. They kicked me off, never gave me a real reason, had automated responses, and now just ignore me. They also held $5000 for 3 months. I guess with 100% feedback and no complaints, they need to worry about me scamming them.

You never think that if you are following all the rules that something like this will happen to you, but it will. I now will not base any income off of third-parties.

It might be nice for some secondary income, but the risk is too high that they will destroy your revenue stream.

It's sick that so many people make these companies thousands and thousands of dollars/month and they can't even give them the common courtesy of a real person to talk to when problems like this arise.

The only reason they can get away with it is because they are a de facto monopoly.

Perhaps having a "right" is too strong of word. But I think anyone that has been told their account is banned because of some generic "risk" would want to know exactly what rule they violated... particularly if $40k is at stake. And while Google may be well within their right to just ban the account and never speak to the account holder again, then EVERYBODY needs to know that this can happen without warning and without recourse. I would imagine that the more people this happens to and the more people that know it, the fewer people would even start down that path.

The real shame is that it is more likely to scare off more legit accounts than fraudsters. People with fraud (or gaming the system) in mind are just going to keep creating accounts and collecting as fast as they can before it gets shut down... and then move on and do it again.

The cynical side of me suspects that it's easier to reject appeals if you don't ever tell the person what you actually suspect them of.

The blog links to a screenshot of the email - http://i.imgur.com/wWyNd.png - which says the personal site was guitarhero-5.com. But even if that is related to this somehow, they said "your AdSense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other AdSense ads."

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