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Five days ago, DigitalPoint Forums, one of the largest webmasters’ community on the Internet stopped placing Google AdSense advertising on their pages. People started to talk about this so the owner of this website, Shawn Hogan, wrote a blog post about what actually happened with AdSense ads.

Although DigitalPoint forums runs the largest support site for AdSense publishers with over 760,000 thread and still counting, it seems nothing could stop Google from banning his account for, what they claim «ads on gambling-related websites». Shawn actually says there is no reasons why his account was banned while his game was fair, no cheating and not against AdSense TOS.

All was working fine until the last month he received 30 warnings from AdSense team saying he is running ads on non-compliant websites which he claims he is not affiliated with in any way nor does he own its. It seems than others (maybe competition ?) used his AdSense publisher ID, or at least that is what Shawn is saying on his blog. The natural move was to respond to those warning, and that is exactly what DigitalPoint Forums owner did, replying that he does not own any of the above sites ; moreover, it seems that those sites were not even of the AdSense whitelist. Although a Google representative answered back with a « your account will not be affected », several days later he received an email stating that his account is disabled due to program policies violation.

He still claims none of those websites belong to him and someone else used his publisher ID for God knows what reason.

The problem that arises from this happening is as following : if a 3rd party person/website can get an AdSense account suspended, doesn’t this mean that this might also apply in link building ? Like some competitor building links from spam websites to yours, this leading to your website getting de-indexed and banned from Google ? It makes sense while even if you cannot control the links that point to your website, you also cannot control who is using your publisher ID, but still get a ban from Google…