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I've placed this ad on this page to celebrate the reinstatement of our AdSense account after 2.5 years in the dark. Hopefully it should appear. Hooray
In March 2014 our AdSense account was suspended. The only specific explanation:
Invalid click activity
Here's a short presentation of why I think it happened.
The records of web traffic that we have access to are the logs generated by AWStats. While I was sifting for answers, I figured they could be made less opaque by creating a tool to visualize them.
of the number of pageviews we received to HTwins.net on every day since May 23, 2012.
I’ve also overlaid a few events that I think might be relevant.
For example, our largest surge of traffic came from Ray William Johnson sharing our Scale of the Universe 2 on his Facebook page.
The load that this put on our hosting provider’s servers automatically shut down our site. When we started using Amazon S3 and brought back the website, it spun up on a different server entirely. This is why these logs begin on May 23, 2012.
This is a visualization of the pageviews we received from other websites’ links in May 2012.
You can see that, at this time, our biggest sources of referrals were Facebook and Yahoo Mail.
Unknown to me until recently, the first Scale of the World app was published by Chao Xu to the iOS App Store not long after our Scale 2 explosion.
The version he repackaged was Scale of the Universe 1 from 2010, interestingly enough.
Reportedly, AdSense started noticing problems about a year before our account’s suspension.
I noticed two spikes (below) from this same period, driven largely by Reddit and Facebook. Could this be what set off the alarms?
If you graph our traffic from Reddit alone, you can see that its spikiness might have created suspicious bursts of traffic.
The second spike (fueled mostly by Facebook) seems to have been so sudden that it registers even on this histogram of hourly pageviews spanning the entire month!
Another thing I noticed about this spike:
It attracted more attention outside of the English-speaking world than before. If you scroll through the referers, you can see a lot more websites in different languages!
Would this cause AdSense to be more suspicious of a spike?
I couldn’t find any directed surges of traffic following the removal of Chao Xu’s app.
I’m not sure Apple or Chao Xu played a role in AdSense’s detection of invalid click activity.
What seems strange to me is that our traffic looks pretty uneventful leading up to our suspension.
I’ve also collected lists of the 100 IP addresses from which we received the most pageviews each month.
Although AdSense had already suspended our account at this point, I did notice August 2014 saw a huge increase in requests from a few IP addresses in France.
All the France requests eventually died down, only for even more requests from Russia to spring up.
Present day. We must have some devoted fans in Russia.
Before making this, I had no idea we’d been receiving this level of abuse. Most of these hits seem to be from bots filling out pages of Edit the Text, a thing I made years ago and forgot about.
Popular bot destinations:
blog: 331k hits in May
IdioticBaka1824: 325k
what the hell are you up to copying that guys URL: 236k
For the main page I had stopped these poets by ignoring all “<a href=...” submissions. I’ve applied this to all pages now.
Thanks for reading! I’m sure this thing isn’t all that useful in the face of AdSense’s own tools, but I figured the data we had would be interesting to visualize.
In summary, here are a few things I think caused AdSense to report invalid click activity:
Steps I can take to improve ad viewership:
Because of this explainer and a Reddit post of video I made, the AdSense team reached out to us and decided to reinstate our account — we're really thankful for that!
Having ads on our website might be a weird thing to celebrate, but being paid for our work is one of the few ways we’re able to justify the months we spend making content that's free to watch.
Being locked out of a monopoly with no lifeline is scary. We got lucky, but it's still happening to people. Don't know what to do. Thanks for reading!