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Comment by JoachimSchipper | Hacker News Reader

[Edited at ~15min, original comment below] This "personal site" was http://guitarhero-4.com, which was a thin affiliate site using a brand name without permission (ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803696, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803746).

I think we've found the problem...

[EDIT: original comment was: Looking at http://web.archive.org/web/20110203092609/http://guitarhero-... (via http://i.imgur.com/wWyNd.png), it appears that this "personal site" was a seedy affiliate site using a brand name without permission.

I think we've found the problem...]

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Not trying to refute you, but how can that be the problem? From the email you cite,

"Please be assured that your Adsense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other Adsense ads."

The author of the blog post states after receiving that email he took the Adsense ads off. This was also in Feb. 2009 and the account was closed in April 2011.

Does the Adsense team (or whoever) go back and look at incidences from 2+ years in the past when looking for people to ban?

He said he took it down and that Google said everything was ok.

"Debby assures us on February 12 that “your AdSense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other AdSense ads.” This is the only issue that has ever been raised by Google in regard to our account."

Are you implying that the Google rep was incorrect and that this issue ultimately manifested itself two years later?

It appears that our account rep mis-typed the URL in that email reply. My site was actually guitarhero-4.com, here's the orignal email we got from them: http://i.imgur.com/2mcfo.png

I honestly don't think that site had anything to do with the ban though as there was over 2 years in between those two incidents.

Don't be so sure. Google has been known to ban Adwords accounts for ads that were deleted years ago because the content of a domain that has obviously been allowed to lapse and been re-registered by someone else has changed.

She told him to take it down and he did. Where is the problem?

I am completely unable to follow your post. Instead of editing comments to include corrections, upvote and respond to the corrections.

The original comment used the word "seedy". It was edited to "thin affiliate" which is less hostile.

My apologies. The original comment referenced guitarhero-5.com, but apparently this was a typo by the Google affiliate and should have been guitarhero-4.com (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803746). This would completely invalidate my comment, prompting me to delete it, except that guitarhero-4.com is also a thin affiliate site - so the original point stands. But my post is indeed confusing, my apologies.

its hillarious you present valid evidence, and people vote you down. Google is evil.. rabble rabble. Yes this was just one case.. without hearing the full story .. this example just proves that theres more to the story.

We provided that email in an effort at full transparency. If you'll note it is in the original post; we're not trying to hide anything here.

says the guy that got banned from adsense for somehow violating TOS, and have been warned in the past of doing something they shouldn't have. Yeah.. im sure the story isn't skewed to benefit you at all.

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