The Internet’s wild frontiers: A cautionary tale

This posting is far from the blog’s primary theme about Construction Marketing Ideas, but I think is worthy of sharing because it touches on some fundamental issues, challenges and opportunities in working online.

I spent many hours yesterday fighting  off a business threat which started when someone in Southern California decided to make things bad for me.

He walked into the lobby of the Hacienda Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, opened his laptop, and using an anonymous “proxy” and the hotel’s free wireless service, set out to have my Google Adsense account disabled for invalid clicks.

By the day’s end, I had (hopefully) survived the ordeal — with a little help from a group  of honorable people on the Internet.

AdSense is part of Google’s industry-shattering revolution that is reshaping the web and has effectively caused chaos for many conventional media outlets and publishers.  Website owners can place contextual advertising code on their sites and Google serves relevant advertising  Every time someone clicks on the site’s advertisements, the advertiser pays Google and then Google shares 68 per cent of the revenue with the website publisher.

This innovation in the middle part of the last decade had many exciting and many equally unintended consequences.  Long established websites with many visitors but not a simple way to earn money suddenly became truly valuable.  Publishers reaped small fortunes effortlessly.  (You simply put the code on your site, and the money starts flowing.)

Of course, some fraudsters and scammers also decided they could make money “fast” this way by setting up sites purely to collect AdSense revenue or, worse, by setting up sites and then arranging for friends or even complete strangers in “click rings” to click on the ads without any interest in the advertising — purely to collect the click-based revenue.

I became aware of AdSense a couple of years after its inception and, recognizing its importance in changing the way advertising is sold and distributed, set up an account for my business.  It generated a tiny amount of income, perhaps slightly more than $100 a month.  At the time we set up the AdSense account, I didn’t monitor or manage the websites that closely.

As Google battled the bad guys, new privacy legislation and technological advances came into force and Google began requiring “privacy policies” on AdSense publisher’s sites.  Google also tightened up its rules to prevent the code from appearing on sites without useful, original content.

As I started this blog, I began developing this type of highly valuable content (for AdSense) but failed to clean up or remove the code from a network of poorly designed and certainly non-compliant (with current AdSense policy) sites.

One day, I turned on my computer to discover that my business’s AdSense account had been disabled because it represented “a significant risk to AdWords advertisers.”  I began checking for answers, and discovered that while Google does not communicate directly with publishers when it disables an account, it maintains a peer-based Help Forum.  I quickly realized that my business account deserved to be disabled because it had several sites which failed to comply with AdSense rules.

I also discovered however that my blog had a separate AdSense account that appeared to be in good order.  I decided to study the rules carefully and then, when things were right, put this AdSense code on the blog site and hope that the advertising would not be disabled again.  (Google haa a zero-tolerance policy for violators — once your account is disabled, and you fail a single appeal, you cannot have another AdSense account.)

After a few months, I received my first payment, then my second.  I decided to explore the reason why I had received a “second chance” and discovered that the one exception to the “only one account” rule is that Google distinguishes between business and personal accounts and you are in fact allowed one of each.  As my personal account fed into a different tax identification and address, it remained in effect — and it does even now.

I decided to “give back” and began posting on the Google Help forums for disabled accounts, offering guidance to people who had lost their accounts, felt demoralized and frustrated and wanted to know what to do to restore their accounts.  In most cases, the disabling is 100 per cent justified.  These help forums operate on the principle of crowdsourcing:  A group of frequent posters helps out people who arrive with crises not knowing what to do; some volunteers spend many hours doing this work; others just a little time.  Sometimes bad advice is given; but is corrected by others monitoring the files.  Google does not need to maintain an expensive staff to serve the audience but a few Google employees monitor the forums in co-operation with “Top Contributors,”  participants who have contributed much useful advice and are given special status and access to Google staff.

This system allows most routine complaints and issues to be resolved quickly without cost to Google, while more serious and individual problems can be “flagged” for special attention.

It turns out, one person in southern California did not like it when I responded to this posting by someone who identified himself as “Cashontree”.

He wrote (typos are as in the original post)

See Even if google validates your clicks for previous month, they wont pay you if they disable your account the next month! what do you call this? google claims they refund advertisers! I believe google takes all the money unless they prove it.

I responded:

It may to be unfair to judge the original poster by his pen-name, but “cashontree” sounds awfully like a get-rich-quick scheme to me.  (The domain, cashontree.com, was registered on May 14 and appears not to link to an active site.)

People who quickly accuse Google of running a scam I sometimes think are thinking with inversion mentality — they may be running the scam!  Anyone who thinks they can “make money fast” with AdSense is in for a rude disappointment; the only people who really hit the mother lode quickly (legitimately) were the very early users several years ago with active, successful websites who discovered, voila, they could monetize their already successful in traffic sites by slipping some AdSense code into the picture.

The gold rush started with a lot of less than savory ppeople playing games with AdWords arbitrage and made-for-AdSense sites and while these have been tamed somewhat by tighter Google rules, the temptation of “making money while you sleep” is just too good for people to not dream of quick cash, fast, with AdSense.

AdSense can still work for publishers with viable sites, and who put effort and time into the thing — but probably the money they can earn that way could be earned more easily other ways.  As it is, Adsense is most definitely not a scam but if you want to grow cash on trees, I suggest you visit a nearby forest.

I suppose “Cashontree” didn’t like what I wrote and decided to give me some of his own medicine.

A couple of nights ago, I noticed a surge in AdSense revenue from California.  I posted the observations on a private forum not within Google’s system available to Top Contributors and a few volunteers who spend significant time helping out on the forums.  (This allows us a safe place to discuss issues and concerns and sometimes seek mutual guidance).  I also began observing “best practices” in dealing with threats.  I “blocked” the mysterious person’s IP address from my blog to prevent further clicks.

The click activity continued and about 36 hours ago, accelerated as “Cashontree” set up an account using an anonymous proxy from a public WIFI “hot spot” at the Hacienda Hotel.

Suddenly, ad clicking activity skyrocketed — worse, the clicks were coming from around the world.  I could not even hope to block the individual sites.  I immediately moved to a more defensive position, removing all my sites (but one hidden holding site) from the “allowed for AdSense” functions.  This means that clicks to the sites would not count for revenue and advertisers would not need to pay for the click-bomber’s malfeasance.

Yesterday morning, I tracked the source of the extensive clicking activity, an Ohio-based service that operates a network of traffic generating services.  This reflects an area of Internet marketing where people pay to have other computers “visit” their sites in exchange for return visits.  Not surprisingly this type of activity is not good for Google if it is abused by AdSense publishers, so Google has strict policy rules against publishers participating in these types of sites designed to artificially increase traffic and click activity.

Fortunately, Rich Parker who operates the services has a legitimate business and agreed that I should not be subjected to visits from sites within his network.  He immediately “disallowed” my sites while sending the original application for his service — the one from Cashontree (who has now started using other pseudonyms on the Google Help Forums).

The application from "cashontree" for Rich Parker's network of link exchanges

The unwanted site traffic has dried up, but I’m afraid I’m not quite out of the woods yet.  “Cashontree” has set up another account on a link exchange program apparently under his control, operating on multiple domains and strange things are continuing to happen, especially in regards to a specialized area of the AdSense system called “AdSense for Search”.

Last night, this individual began spamming the AdSense forums, listing other legitimate sites while encouraging users to click on their ads illegally with the hopes that they, too, will be disabled.

I am continuing to work with colleagues on the private forum to explore and resolve the outstanding issues.

They offered one piece of advice which I wish I had heeded before all of this had happened.  If you want to work in the public spaces on the Internet where disturbed and angry people sometimes hang out, don’t let anyone know who you are.

But I am a journalist.  I work in the open and I believe that truthful and honorable reporting is essential for a healthy society.

As an interim and precautionary measure, I have removed the AdSense code from this site and have revised the site’s theme.