Here’s a post I made on Digital Point regarding Adsense, reproduced here for posterity :) 

I see so many threads started on DP regarding Adsense users being banned, seemingly everyday a member posts how they have been banned but have done nothing wrong, below I will attempt to cover the methods Google MAY use to determine behaviour which contravenes their TOS and results in a user being banned.

Firstly, there is one blatantly obvious reason for being banned which everybody knows about and everybody who has an Adsense account (and wants to keep it) should never break, and that’s the ‘don’t click on your own ads’ rule (along with ‘don’t get other people to click on your ads’).

Additionally there is the possibility that a user could be banned for creating too many impressions of the ads shown on their own sites, so don’t view your own sites pages to much when showing Adsense ads on it. If you are doing development or testing that will result in you viewing your own sites Adsense ads more than would be reasonable, you should disable the ads until your work is complete.

Now, going back to the ‘being banned for clicking your own ads’ scenario.

What seems to happen is some people with Adsense accounts think they are smarter than Google and can find ways to ‘fool’ Google into believing the clicks they (or their friends/accomplices) make on their own sites ads are valid, this is the mistake that puts the nail in the coffin of their Adsense career.

So the following is some info to those people with Adsense who will be thinking about trying to fool Google, and in a few months will be posting on DP about how they were unjustifiably banned.

Google has many ways to determine click validity, the first mistake Adsense fraudsters make is to believe that making the fraudulent clicks from different IP addresses is enough to convince Google the clicks are valid, its not.

Think about the information Google has at its disposal to detect fake clicks:

• Google knows from all the other Adsense accounts the ‘typical’ number of clicks to be expected for a certain number of impressions in any particular sector or niche.
• Google knows what effect different ad placement positions on your site has on the potential CTR (click through rate) and can easily examine your sites ad positioning to see if it really can generate the CTR you are generating.
• Google knows from the IP addresses the rough geographical location where each click is generated from, and can easily see if a pattern exists where clicks are generated from a certain region or country that is outside what they would expect to see.
• Google knows where your site is listed in its search result pages for certain keywords relating to your site and therefore can estimate the potential number of clicks your site may generate compared to other similar sites.For example if a legitimate site is listed in the top 10 results for the keyphrase ‘fantastic website’ and Google knows this site gets 20 clickthroughs per day, they then see your site which they know is listed at position 245 for the same keyphrase but you are getting 100 clickthroughs per day then they will have a suspicion something maybe up.

  “Aha…” you say, “…but I may get traffic from many other sources that Google doesn’t know about”, wrong. Google knows how many links your site has compared to other sites, it knows how popular those sites may or may not be and therefore how much traffic they are likely to send to your site, and it can easily pull together a bunch of stats for a selection of Adsense sites to see if your sites miraculous click through rate is really for real.

• Google knows from their own search engine result stats in which countries any particular site may be ranked highly, if a site gets an unusual number of clicks from a country where they know the site is obviously not so popular then its another pointer to suspect click activity.
• Google knows what type of site is likely to be a source of fraudulent clicks. If you run a respected travel site for example, with daily updates, news, features and lots of great content then Google knows you are probably to busy to bother trying to roll them over for a few dollars of fraudulent clicks. If, on the other hand, you have Adsense ads showing on an MFA site, a proxy site, or some other obviously low quality and poorly maintained site, then Google will take a closer look at the clicks your site generates as, statistically, there is a much higher chance your clicks are fraudulent compared to a well run and maintained site.

So what does the above tell you? That’s right, you really cant fool Google. They have so much information available to them to see if your site fits within the expected range of Adsense earnings for your particular site that it is probably laughably easy for them to see when there is fraudulent activity.

Bottom line, don’t click your own ads and don’t get others to click the ads for you, either way Google will spot it and the next thing you will know is you cant login to your Adsense account and there is a nice email from them telling you have been banned, and then you’ll be posting on DP about how they banned you for no reason, they don’t ban anyone or no reason, taking into account the above you can assume they can be 99% certain someone is trying to fool them, so don’t do it!