Google Loses Small Claims Court Case Over "Disabled AdSense Account"

It's great when a person or a company gets their just deserts.

I recently read a Huffington Post story about how Aaron Greenspan (not to be confused with the former Fed boss) sued Google in small claims court and won. Google "disabled" his AdSense account with no explanation and no recourse. Greenspan sued and won $761.00, plus $40 to make up for the suit's filing fee. It's a great article. You can read it here.

How much is a moral victory worth? Round trip from the east coast to California, plus food, lodging and other miscellaneous expenses? If the Googleplex was located in my county, I would have considered suing Google in small claims court when the company decided to terminate my AdSense account years ago. But since it's in Mountain View, CA, for me -- and for most -- the whole enterprise would be too expensive to be practical. Mr. Greenspan had a distinct advantage in that his business is located within walking distance of the Clara County courthouse in Palo Alto, CA, which is exactly where you have to go if you want to sue Google in small claims court. He literally walked to the courthouse to file the lawsuit.

Even though I lost about $1,000 when Google closed my account, the end result was that I made a whole lot more money. That's because I was relying too heavily on AdSense to monetize my sites, and AdSense should never be a publisher's main source of revenue (especially since an account can be killed at any time!) I was earning between $0.50 and $7 per click, but the high-quality, targeted traffic I was sending to other sites was making a lot more money for the owners of those sites. Yep. After I reconfigured my sites, I ended up making 15 to 20 times more than I was with AdSense. A costly lesson, but one that helped me become a far more successful publisher, and an employer.

I currently use Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) ads on certain sites in my portfolio, and so far it's been great. I joined YPN soon after my AdSense account was disabled, and it's been nothing but smooth sailing since. With YPN, the ad targeting and ad inventory has never been as good as AdSense. However, if my AdSense account was still active today, I'm 99% certain that I would choose to stick with YPN and use the platform's manual ad targeting feature, rather than sweat over the interminable threat of the AdSense ax. My sites contain prime content. I don't deserve such nonsense.

These days, I do business with Google only when I have to. It's not just because my AdSense account was closed. Right now, I have a site that has no Pagerank^TM on any of it's pages, despite having thousands of quality incoming links. The site isn't banned from Google, but it's obviously suffering one of Google's penalties, and I have no idea why. No blackhat SEO -- ever -- and all original content. Google recently lifted an unjust and heavy penalty from another robust site I own, so I was expecting all silly penalties to be lifted by now. Despite numerous attempts to get the penalty removed, the sites is still being punished for no reason. This penalty caused the following ugly situation: content pirates stole my good content and put it on their own spammy sites, which resulted in phrases from that same stolen content ranking far above my own site in the Google search engine results pages (SERP's.) I'm still wasting a lot of time faxing DMCA complaints to get my stolen content removed from those illegitimate websites (kudos to HubPages.com for responding very fast to my complaint.) So, can you blame me for being pissed?

I still admire Google and love many of their free services like Gmail, Analytics, Translate, Maps, Earth, Calendar, etc. (though I feel like I have paid to use them.) Google is constantly tweaking it's policies and algorithm, so I'm hoping they shed their not-so-enlightened and near-tyrannical policies before they alienate any more publishers.

Bottom line: Google is a rich company. They need to hire a lot more talented people to handle complaints from legitimate publishers.

GoDaddy.com Virtual Dedicated Hosting

Unable to Move My FeedBurner Feeds to My Google Account

I've been trying to move my feeds from FeedBurner to my Google account for some time, but a glitch in the migration process has me stuck at this page:



When I click the [Next] button, I returned to the same page. If I click on "cancel and do not move feeds," I am taken to this page:



Then, when I click on the [Move my account now] button, I am taken back to -- you guessed it -- the "Move feeds to your Google Account" page (the first screen shot above.)

Talk about frustrating.

Right now, I have no access to my FeedBurner stats; Google is moving all FeedBurner accounts to its own feeds management system. Can anyone offer any insight?

GoDaddy.com Virtual Dedicated Hosting

Chrome: Google's New Web Browser

Google released the beta version of its new web browser today. It's called Chrome and you can download it here. Learn more about it here and here.

Certain features look interesting, like dynamic tabs, incognito mode and crash control. The safety features also appear to be quite impressive.

I'm really interested in the safety features, so I conducted a quick test with Chrome. I visited a site that I know contains malware to see if Chrome would stop me from visiting the URL (malware programs are particularly dangerous because they can infect your computer by simply visiting a URL.) Chrome performed well. It prevented me from visiting the URL, and offered a detailed explanation of the threat.

I can also report that Chrome is lightning fast: the application opens in a flash and browsing is effortless. This is based on my quick and dirty test. Who knows: it may slow down over time.

Chrome is only available for Windows XP and Vista. I'm going to take it for a more thorough test drive on my Windows XP machine later. I can't use it on my other machines since they run older versions of Windows.

If you decide to give it a try, feel free to post your comments here. Thanks!

GoDaddy.com Virtual Dedicated Hosting

Google "Expires" Some Old Penalties

Google has removed a very nasty penalty (or maybe penalties?) from a key website within my empire. Now that the penalty is gone, this particular site now ranks very well for the keywords I've been targeting for about 3 years.

I should be celebrating, but I'm not.

The way I see it, big G shouldn't have implemented those silly penalties in the first place. I'm certain the reason they decided to drop these penalties was because they realized sites with top notch content were being penalized so heavily that they could no longer be found in the top 100 for targeted keywords and keyphrases. What really bugs me is that it took them so long to realize that those penalties were...well...stupid. Google has some very smart people working at the Googleplex, so I guess I'm just very disappointed.

Webmasters Still Obsessed with PageRank

Matt Cutts blogged about the expired penalties on July 24th. At the time of this blog post, there were 245 comments. Most of the comments were about the latest PageRank update. So far, hardly anyone has been interested in discussing the expiration of penalties, even though that's the most significant Google SERP's-related news I've read in some time. PageRank is pretty much meaningless these days, yet site owners still obsess over it. I guess all those commenters own directories.

GoDaddy.com Virtual Dedicated Hosting

Google Wipes Out An Internet Cottage Industry

Google has just wiped out an entire Internet cottage industry: selling text links. Sites that are known to sell links are being penalized like crazy with the latest Google Pagerank update, with some sites dropping from PR7 to PR0.

Is this a good thing? Maybe. But, from my perspective, it's a raw deal.

I have a site that ranks well in Google for competitive keyphrases, despite having pages with low or no Pagerank. However, another site of mine used to have PR on many pages, but now has PR0 on all pages. Never sold links on it, all original content and the site has plenty of quality incoming links. The site is still being indexed (according to Google's Webmaster Tools), so I know it's not officially banned by Google, but it doesn't rank for anything, so, in essence, it might as well be. This situation is frustrating, not because I'm some bitter Internet publisher with a new site that contains crappy content, but because the site has age, and my content is much better than most sites that rank above me. And I know my site's content is good, because I'm constantly finding new (and unsolicited) links from very respectable sites -- and that's the kind of proof that Google should acknowledge, n'est ce pas?

My site has been sodomized, without the benefit of K-Y or a reach-around. I am being forced to perform Adwords fellatio on Google, and I don't like the taste. Yep.

Once again, the folks at Google have found a way to alienate this webmaster. But don't worry, G, we're still friends (yes, I like to pretend that you care.) I love Gmail and Analytics and Google Maps, and I'm still impressed with how sophisticated yet user-friendly the Adwords platform is. I just hope big G shows my neglected sites some love in the near future.

For the record: I don't have an issue with Google trying to maintain the quality of its index. I do have a problem, however, with the hypocrisy of certain methods the company is employing. It appears that Google is penalizing sites that sell links to pass on Pagerank, but do you think that they are penalizing sites like Business.com or Yahoo!? These sites sell links that pass on Pagerank, and they charge a lot more than most sites that Google is currently penalizing.

GoDaddy.com Virtual Dedicated Hosting