Can it get you banned?

Do you use Google Adsense on your website? Be careful of external links to third-party download sites, after today, you should be careful of external links to sites that violate Adsense policies and distribute copyrighted or pirated files.

No doubt that Google Adsense It is still the most popular and easiest way to monetize content on the internet, considering its high conversion rate and residual benefits. But at the same time, it is also surrounded by risks and new website maintainers often find that Program policies Not enough detail. You build a website, work hard, use legitimate methods to build traffic and get visitors, and one day the infamous email from adsense to your inbox stating that your website has violated one or more policies.

In rare cases, AdSense will send a warning email and give the publisher 72 hours to fix issues that do not comply with AdSense program policies. I had it once and I know how awful it was (to be honest, it was a shock to me). But there is no guarantee that you will get this warning message and Google reserves the right to permanently ban your account without giving you any warning in the first place.

That could be disastrous, because once you get kicked out of adsense You cannot sign up for a new account using the same name as the previous one, nor the same email account, residential address among other details. There are a few workarounds but none of them are legit, so I will not discuss them in this article.

Now there is a case where Google has stopped showing ads because the website in question has a blog article linked to a third party file download site. The publisher in question requested that his name be withheld. Below is a copy of the email he received from Google a few weeks ago:

Email Adsense, example

An excerpt from the email (the important snippet):

AdSense publishers are not allowed to place Google ads on sites involved in the distribution of copyrighted material. This includes hosting copyrighted files on your site as well as providing links to or directing traffic to sites containing copyrighted material.

Hosting copyrighted material on the site is certainly not the reason why Google has stopped displaying ads on the publishers’ website. The problem is that this publisher has a blog post (which was published 3 years ago) and the page in question linked to a file on a free file download site. The file in question is free of copyright and was just a press report in .doc format. There is no copyright infringement relating to the document itself, and no claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In my opinion, the reason why Google took action on a page three years after it was published is as follows:

When the blog article was published in early 2012, the third-party file download site was fresh and did not have many pirated files on its server. During these three years, the third-party download site became greedy, allowing users to download pornographic and pirated files in large quantities, thus earning a bad name in the eyes of Google. It’s impossible to remember every site you link your pages to, so what happened is that the publisher completely forgot about that blog post and just kept building their website, like we usually do.

Suddenly, the third-party download site went out of line and Google had to flag it down. Meanwhile, Google discovered which sources are linking to the third-party site and driving traffic to it. As a result, my friend’s website got flagged somehow and Google stopped showing ads on his website. still an account adsense is active, but Google has disabled ad serving on that specific site that is linked to another site that hosts copyrighted or pirated content.

This is ridiculous, at least the publisher should get a warning email but google is behaving otherwise.

Now you can discuss why the publisher would use another website to host a simple word document and not their own site or FTP server for that matter. All I can say is that there are many occasions when you are left with no other choice. Given a Blogger blog that was created in 2009, there is no way you can upload a Blogsot file and link it to an article from the blog (for example, a PDF document).

I will share another case example where there is not much in control of the publisher.

Let’s say I have a blog that is being monetized using Google Adsense. I found a really interesting story on another site, wrote a response post on my blog and linked to the source. I also linked to one of the PDF reports he hosted on his web server.

After 5 years, the owner of this website decided not to keep the PDF file on their website and uploaded this file to a third party download server (such as Rapidshare, Mediafire). In addition, it did a permanent 301 redirect of the PDF in its server to the new location, which is now available on the third party download site.

Now the question remains, what should I do? How do I know when someone changes the destination of a link, in some way, beyond my control?

In the legal picture, it’s the publishers’ fault. If it is your own website, it is your responsibility to maintain it, perform quality checks and provide a good user experience. And if you are using Google AdSense, you must ensure that you are not violating the rules, either directly or indirectly. But as you can see, it is impossible to scan and check all these links every week, especially if your website is large and contains thousands of pages or articles.

The only option we have is to perform a credibility check before linking to any external website or blog:

• Is this source considered authoritative and credible in what he does?
• How often is this site updated?
• Who writes the stories? Check out the author’s Twitter and Facebook profile, and see if his words are genuine or fake.
• Have you seen any other mention of the site on another popular blog or news directory? For example, Techmeme, Google News.

I also recommend using Xenu link to scan all external links and check their destination once in a while. The way Google is banning AdSense publishers is quite scary, and other than fixing things on your end, you have no other choice.

Not expecting Google to always send a warning email is like, “The Titanic cannot sink.”

These are just some of the cases that I received, so do you know now why you should be wary of external links to sites that violate AdSense policies?

Further reading:

1. How to register for Google Adsense
2. Tips and tricks to grow your AdSense income.
3. Strategies to increase your cost per click

So, do you think that external links to sites that violate Adsense policies will also be visible on your site?

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