I mentioned in the previous post that I made a really critical review on one webmaster and unfortunately for me he “asked” his friends to try to get me banned from AdSense by Click bombing my AdSense websites. This is totally wrong behaviour and almost got me banned and now I‘m going to explain you how to defend yourself again such threats as I was able to survive it and not get my AdSense Account Banned.
First, What is AdSense click-bombing. Click-Bombing is when a malicious user enters your website with the intent to massively click AdSense ads with the sole purpose of getting the owner of the web site‘s AdSense account banned. In such events, the AdSense CTR goes sky-high as the bomber clicks hundreds of time on the ads displayed and therefore rises flag for AdSense SPAM. AdSense Spam comes in two natures. If you click your own ads or get someone to click your ads. Both cases are strongly forbidden in the AdSense Terms of Use and therefore you can get your AdSense account banned and loose all the available funds……
The first and most important thing when you see that someone is trying to get you Click bombed is to stop the ads. Just remove them temporarily until the whole issue gets resolved. Immediately after that you have to send notification to the Google AdSense team via the form in your account in AdSense -> Help. In the letter/request you should mention that someone is trying to Click Bomb you and you need them to figure out a way to stop this and ask them not to Ban your account for something that ain‘t your fault!
In about 90% of the situations that you were Click Bombed and you reacted on time, your account won‘t be stopped or banned, but if you react slowly you might really get banned and loose your money. I spoke with few people that were not monitoring they accounts and suddenly got banned from Click Bombing and that‘s really sad because in such ways you can spam anyone that has AdSense account and get him banned just like that! I beilve its totally unfair!
On the other hand I‘m 100% for banning AdSense accounts where the webmasters give incentives to their users to click on ads and therefore the publishers loose tons of money. This is the well know MFA assault and its really bad because its decreasing the Cost-Per-Click for good websites as advertisers can not afford to pay a lot of money for good CTR because their ROI is very low. The better their ROI is the higher CPC will be and we can win out of it not loose….
Now How to Protect yourself from such attacks…
is any software to avoid click bombing ?
Well for starters, you can remove a your site into the Adsense Account Trusted Sites until the issue is settled.
For my website, I added PHP if statement where I can easily remove all add in all my template files.
I created php files for each ad unit: 250×250.php, 468×90.php, 728×90.php, etc and put them all in /ads folder. I use php include to call the ad.
When I need to disable all the ads, all to do is to rename the /ads folder before have time to remove it manually from the script.
But the if statement seems a great idea as well.