A trusted and highly esteemed colleague of mine who does real well with Adsense recently told me that all his sites running Adsense have been banned from Google.  He runs tons of other sites using differing sponsors and those sites have remained in Google’s index.

How do you know if your site is banned from google?  Do a search for site:YOURDOMAIN.com  If your site’s listings appear, you are not banned.

This banning seems very odd since he took great pains to use the following:

Differing class C ips
Differing Whois registrars
Differing niches
Differing designs/layouts
All original niche-specific content

In fact, all factors were different.  The only point of commonality is the Adsense Publisher ID.

Based on this information, it seems that the following is happening:

Google is “punishing” perceived “violations” of its policies by banning the offending sites through Adsense.  My colleague did nothing wrong–the sites weren’t scraped, he used only original content.  The links were completely white hat.  Note that he did not get banned from Adsense but from Google. Terrible implications for people building Made For Adsense (MFA) sites.

MFA sites get a bad rap because QUALITY made for adsense networks (like my colleague’s) are often lumped, unfairly, with cookie-cutter template-driven low content quality/scraped content sites.  Google’s been going after MFA sites with, it seems, indiscriminate shots from its BAN shotgun and it seems many legitimate publishers are caught in the blast range.

Leave a comment and let me know if you’ve suffered the same fate or know anyone who has.

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