Blogger + AdSense = Too many eggs in one basket

Most of my reader mail is positive, saying how much they like the book and/or the blog. Occasionally, though, I get unhappy mail, and here's a case in point. The reader's not unhappy with me, they're unhappy with Google.

This particular reader was running a couple of blogs using Blogger (and their free blog hosting on Blogspot.com) and showing AdSense ads on them. I don't think they were huge moneymakers, but the reader seemed happy enough with them. Certainly they spent time updating and maintaining them. But then they were the target of a click fraud attack.

I've written about click fraud many times before — check the archive for the details. If someone targets one of your sites for click fraud, there's very little you can do personally other than turn off the ads and contact Google as quickly as possible about it.

Now, Google's default policy about click fraud seems to be to presume that the account holder is guilty of complicity until proven otherwise. This is why it's important to contact Google quickly when you notice unusual earnings patterns. Accounts suspected of click fraud complicity are suspended or even terminated immediately. And this is what happened to my reader.

AdSense account termination/suspension is bad enough, but here's the worst part for my reader: his Blogger blogs were also removed. Google's been under fire from the blog community for enabling the creation of untold number of “splogs” — spam blogs — and they seem to be moving aggressively to get rid of suspicious blogs in response. It looks like when they terminate/suspend an AdSense account they also go looking for any blogs that account holder might have on Blogger to kill those as well. This is all conjecture on my part, based on input from only one of my readers, but it seems a safe assumption.

The lesson to be learned here? Don't put all your eggs in one basket, as the saying goes. If you're using AdSense for content monetization, don't use Blogger's free blog hosting to host that content. My reader's now lost his content, except what he can find by searching through the Google cache. Losing the AdSense account was bad enough, but I'd be apoplectic if I lost all the content I'd worked so hard on these last few months.

My reader is appealing both issues, of course, and I hope both of his accounts get reinstated. Like I said before, Blogger does have its costs.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

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