Don’t Click This

If you go back through my blog archives, you’ll find no links to any of my main websites. You may find this strange, but I do have a good reason. It is true that having a blog is a great way to get extra visitors to your website and I do actually run a separate blog in conjunction with one of my sites for this reason, but I never link to it from this blog.

My reason for this is Google Adsense, which I run as well as affiliate programs as my main source of income. You see, there are some really ‘clever’ wankers people who go around clicking on Adsense ads in an attempt to get that person banned from Adsense and unfortunately, it often works. This is made worse by the fact that from what I’ve seen it’s practically impossible to get back in once you’ve been given the boot. Both Chris and James have both recently been banned from Adsense for ‘invalid clicks’.

You may be thinking that I’m just being paranoid and wasting a perfectly good traffic source but it won’t take you long to find other examples of people being banned for invalid clicks and I know for a fact that a lot of these people linked to their own sites from their own blogs. John Chow recently made a post about someone clicking on his adsense ads over 1000 times (that person must lead a really fulfilling life), but lucky for John he’s a highly valued Google publisher and they know he wouldn’t be artificially generating clicks.

At the end of the day, you are always going to get haters and new web publishers are easy targets for them. Linking from your blog may seem like a great way to get traffic to your sites and an extra link but you may want to think twice if you’re running Adsense on those particular sites. Obviously, if you generate thousands of dollars a month for Google then you probably have a dedicated contact to resolve any situations like this but for most of us, that is unfortunately not the case.