We have all heard the horror stories. I hear one I'd say once every day on the webmaster forums I frequent. Some poor webmaster gets the “Blue Mail Of Death” from Google TELLING them they clicked their own ads or they have been involved in some sort of click fraud. Then that's it. Game over. No more adsense. And to salt up the wound a little more, they keep what's in the account. Be it legit, or fraudulent. It seems too that Google like to top it off by waiting until payday to announce this

Now while this has never happened to me and while I find it hard to believe that the smart people over at Google are stupid enough to cancel accounts as blatantly and without much reason than above, this does appear to happen. (I'd like to clarify here that I am only aware of one person/site that I am absolutely positive was banned for the wrong reasons)……

So what now?

You can beg Google to let you back in, you can complain on the webmaster forums, you can bitch and moan. That's about it.

I have spoken to people that are 100% sure they are innocent and got their accounts reinstated by CALLING Google rather than mailing them.

Call and ask for the highest position representative available, but be polite and explain your situation clearly. DO NOT piss Google off!

Unless you had some sort of backup in place or contingency plan. You do have a contingency plan right? Try not to despair; there are a few other decent contextual ad companies out there. YPN appear to be good (I am Irish so I have no experience with them) and Adbrite have been nothing short of amazing for me.

Anyway, getting back to my point. In this scenario, all eggs were in one virtual basket. If this was your entire business, it's pretty much game over for you.

Say for example, you were making $4000 a month with Google Adsense.

Had you had spread your income out as follows:

Google adsense: $500

YPN: $500

Direct Advertising: $1000

Other: $1000

You would only be down $500 a month. This would at least give you some time to research alternatives, or come up with some new ideas to fill in your “revenue hole”. I know this seems VERY obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people I hear crying out for help in this department.

I have my online businesses spread out amongst 4 contextual ad networks, 5 CPM/CPA networks, direct advertising, software sales, services and some small ecommerce. If one of these fails, or for some reason I am wrongfully accused by the powers that be, I still have the others.

If you have all your virtual eggs on one virtual basket, I strongly urge you to start thinking about the worst case scenario and consider the possibility that the base of that basket may someday fall through.