If the facts of the matter are as presented by the blogger in question that seems to be the case.
Posted by Eric Earling at December 07, 2007 06:53 AM | Email ThisThere was no resource to mediate the situation. There is not Google Support number. There is no email to support (well, there is, but don't expect an answer). It's a total black box with no faces. Really, do any people work there, or is just a server farm.
Google frightens me, and I wish there were more competition in the search and search-advertising world to take them off their pedestal.
Yet to get hammered the way Google is doing it is, as I posted at his site, akin to nuclear annihilation on account of a one-hour overdue library book.
Sounds like some Yahoo in the Google legal or accounting department is way too zealous for Google's own good.
The Piper
Posted by: Piper Scott on December 7, 2007 08:33 AMOne of the major stockholders is none other than "free speech as long as I agree with it" Al Gore.
I just wish there were more search engines. I have trouble anymore shopping online using Google because it doesn't seem there is much competition because all I get are their advertisers.
Google should have a right to advertise or use their site to set where or when they advertise. The blogger in question wasn't deleted; he just doesn't get revenue from ads Google doesn't want to place on his blog.
If you think Google is goofy, ever tried to talk to DirectTV? After five appointments to get HD from Ironwood Communications, we gave up. All the DirectTV people said were, "sorry." That is like 5 x 4 hours each.
Posted by: swatter on December 7, 2007 09:27 AMMuch like the fiasco with music DRM- Google can screw you big time w/out repercussions. Free is worth every penny.
Eric-Stefan you guys should consider hosting for other local bloggers. I trust you guys a hell of a lot more than google.
Posted by: Andy on December 7, 2007 09:33 AMWhat would stop someone from just creating such a scenario, to purposely be banned by Google, so that they could then scream bloody murder while asking for donations, etc. (Isn't that Al Gore's whole strategy with Global Warming?) Not that this guy did that specifically, but you have to ask the questions.
Clearly, SP does a lot of traffic with Google AdSense. And some people post some pretty controversial stuff here. For that matter, look at HorsesAss. Any one comment from one of their profane and crazy bloggers or commenters would be enough to justify shutting them out of AdSense, but it has not happened. (It would be fun to see Goldy scream though.)
All that said, Google does appear to have some righteous ideology from somewhere near the top, that often finds its way in to the business decisions. It reminds me of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. And Google's actions with respect to enabling China's censorship, etc. are definitely questionable.
It's a brave new world. You pays your nickel, and you takes your chances.
Posted by: Jeff B. on December 7, 2007 10:02 AMThe only way to know if that was the case is to see the IP addresses of where the click throughs were coming from, and Google's the only one with that information. If the blogger feels that strongly that there was no organized click throughs going on, he should bring a legal claim. Somehow, I doubt that's forthcoming. If he did that, I would be more inclined to believe that he was just an innocent victim.
Posted by: Palouse on December 7, 2007 10:18 AMGoogle has no accurate way of distinguishing between him doing it and someone else. I suppose they could check his IP of registration. But anyone savvy enough to set up an automatic clicker would probably be savvy enough to set up a small network of compromised machines to do its bidding. If Google let everyone keep their money if they were benefiting from a "zombie" network attack, they'd effectively have no anti-abuse system. So they take the other extreme, which is to assume that no one would bother to perform a "zombie" attack that doesn't benefit their own cause. It seems that may have happened here, for reasons unknown (sabotage comes to mind).
Posted by: Benjamin Johnstone-Anderson on December 7, 2007 10:33 AMI have (had) approximately 80 sites that were using Adsense. One day last week when routinely checking stats, I found out my account was disabled.
No notice. No e-mail stating why. Nothing.
Now, it's possible that a user on one of my sites got happy with clicking the ads. But I don't know. Because they won't tell me.
In the meantime, I'm losing revenue and I have no idea why my account was suspended in the first place.
Fact is, my situation and this guy's situation is not unusual. This happens to people everyday - and mostly through no fault of their own. But try to get ANY information from the Big G? Snort. Forget it.
Posted by: jimg on December 7, 2007 10:40 AMIt's unclear whether this happened because you violated Googles "terms and conditions" or Google did not want to pay you.
Here's the contact info
WSBA Lawyer Profile
Member Name Steve W. Berman WSBA Bar # 12536
Firm or Employer Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro Admit Date 7/20/1982
Address 1301 5th Ave Ste 2900
Seattle, WA
98101-2609
Status Active
Phone (206) 623-7292
Fax (206) 623-0594
Email
Private Practice
Has Insurance? - Click for more info
Last Date Reported
Only active members of the Washington State Bar Association, and others as authorized by law, may practice law in Washington.
The discipline search function may or may not reveal all disciplinary action relating to a lawyer. The discipline information accessed is a summary and not the official decision in the case. For more complete information, call 206-727-8207 and press 7.
Disclaimer
The blogger is extremely critical of the pharmaceutical industry. Any advertiser has the right to pull their ads if they don't like what's being shown, whether its in print, on TV or on the web.
Posted by: M. Sanchez on December 7, 2007 05:21 PMYes, even if it's not the blogger's fault that one of his readers is repeatedly clicking all his ad links to deliberately sabotage him. Google has millions of clients serving billions of ads - it's not economical for them to do a deep investigation on a piddly $15 or $30/day account. Their terms of use reserve them the right to suspend accounts for any reason.
Calling out the lawyers? Get real, people. Read your contracts, and if you don't like 'em, don't agree to 'em.
Posted by: real capitalists read contracts on December 7, 2007 07:26 PMWell don't you just love it. The Seattle times is now making news instead of reporting it.
The Gov just asked the White House on Thursday for help, and what do we see in the paper today?
(Still waiting) We have no idea when the Gov even asked for help. Was it 2:30 in the after noon or 6:00 in morning.
It's know wonder they call it the Seattle Slime paper.
for those who think this is advertisers pressing to have me censored: well, maybe, but i kind of doubt it since a fair number of the google ads on my site are for therapists, alternative health care etc., so i'm not so sure big pharma would have so much incentive to go after me. but ya never know.
to the others who've been done wrong by google: i hear ya. we ought to start taking these fools on together.
all in all, i just want google to send me the 600 they owe me for clicks before the days that this happened. so far the server farm in the sky won't tell me a thing about that. i'll gladly switch to other providers and would encourage others to do the same.
Posted by: Philip Dawdy on December 8, 2007 11:31 AMBottom line is that Google obviously knows that Phillip is anti pharm and when it comes to the drugs that they push on society for myriad "mental illnesses", yet Google places the very ads on his website that he's rallying against. Isn't it possible to place other ads on his blog?
Bottom line here is that Google screwed him over at the behest of the advertisers that were being harmed on Phillip's blog, pure and simple.
And while I don't know the success of such a try, I do hope that he does take legal action against Google. Just the bad press alone should be enough to get Google to back down and lay off the "gestapo" tactics.
At least that's my hope at least, albeit a small one...
Posted by: thirteenburn on December 9, 2007 07:17 PMWhy anyone would bother to censor a guy pulling $30 a day sort of suggests Google has room fulls of people sitting around reading posts looking for stuff to censor. I sort of doubt that, but don't let that keep your tinfoil on as tightly as you want.
As one that enforces a Terms of Service, what this looks like to me is
- automated metrics that were possibly mistaken
- automated responses by a tier 1 or tier 2 flunkie pasting in boilerplate answers
- spending about 30 seconds tops to do it, because
- they deal with thousands of these a week, and
- aren't staffed enough to do more.
Put all that together and his site looked to the enforcement script like it had been compromised because of the N percent jump in traffic over T time which someone decided fit the profile of X frauded sites, and it acted on that, and closed him down.
After that .. pure conjecture, but was malware on your site ruled out? Who do you host with? What widgetry was on your site, and was it regularly updated by third parties you might not be aware of what they were putting in? Its possible this all could have been third party click thru's you weren't causing, but that were coming from your site none the less. Anyone do an audit of your site/hosting provider for the vulnerability to cross-site scripting lately? All plausable, none ruled out yet, and Google is just protecting their interest based on their installed metrics, which may or may not be flawed, but has very little to do with censorship, despite what your instinct and paranoia might suggest. IMHO. BBQ.
Posted by: DaveD on December 10, 2007 08:34 AMThen again, I have a bunch of friends who work there and if there's a problem I can get an answer ...
Posted by: pudge on December 11, 2007 06:05 PM