How can I avoid being banned from AdSense?

Google’s AdSense program is a popular way to monetize content-rich sites.
When you start making real money from it (see The AdSense Crapshoot) you naturally worry about being banned from AdSense and losing that income stream. Here are some tips to follow to avoid AdSense banning.

1. Don’t Click Your Own Ads

This seems obvious, but a lot of new AdSense publishers don’t seem to realize that the AdSense terms and conditions forbid you from clicking ads on your own pages/sites. Accidental clicks are one thing — Google will simply ignore those — but determined efforts to increase your earnings will get you banned very quickly.

2. Don’t Encourage Others To Click Your Ads

Wording like “Please support by this by clicking the ads” and so on is an easy way to get banned. Don’t ever ask anyone to click your ads, either explicitly or implicitly.

3. Keep Friends and Family Away

Don’t tell your friends and family about your sites. Or at least don’t tell them about how you make money from those sites. Otherwise, at least one of them will start clicking your ads on a regular basis, probably on several pages at a time. Google’s algorithms will notice these, even if you don’t and even if you had nothing to do with them.

4. Don’t Use AdSense Arbitrage

For several years AdSense publishers were able to direct pay-per-click traffic to their pages and (if they did it right) make money from the difference between what they paid for the traffic and what they made from the AdSense earnings. This arbitrage was recently disallowed by Google. So if you send PPC traffic to a site, make sure the landing pages you’re using don’t have ads. (It’s OK to have ads on the other pages of the site, just not on the landing pages themselves.)

5. Report Suspicious Activity

If you see suspicious activity on your site — earnings that are way out of whack for no appreciable reason — then don’t be afraid to report it to Google as soon as you wonder about it. They’ll investigate. You may lose earnings due to invalid clicks, but you won’t be penalized yourself.

6. Understand the AdSense Terms and Conditions

Take the time to read through the AdSense terms and conditions as well as the AdSense program policies. These tell you in great detail what you can and can’t do as an AdSense publisher. You’re expected to understand them. If you have any questions, ask Google to answer them.

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