AdSense, "unusual activity," and overreacting

I’m kicking myself today.

A couple of days ago, I saw my AdSense earnings shoot way up in a short time span.

On investigating, I found that a small site that usually gets only a few page views a day was suddenly getting hundreds of visits in a highly unusual surge of traffic. All — literally all — of the traffic was coming in via AOL search from one particular search phrase, which brought up an image on the site, which AOL displays as a a thumbnail above the normal search results. This was a search phrase that normally brings only a few visits per month. But the traffic was coming in from all different IP addresses, different hosts, from different parts of the country, and with the normal and expected distribution of operating systems and user-agents. And the CTR on the ads was around 5% — also perfectly within the normal range. It sure appeared to be real traffic from real people, but it was something like 1,000 times the usual amount of traffic to that site, in just 2 hours.

I panicked! I reported the unusual activity to Google, of course, using their form. (Which form, by the way, is difficult to find if you don’t have it bookmarked.)

But in addition to panicking and reporting, I also suspended the site. I unsuspended the site the next day, but removed the AdSense blocks from the page that was getting all the traffic.

When I finally heard back from Google, it sounded like they were considering the traffic to be legitimate, and the clicks and earnings are still showing in my account. They told me I could put my AdSense ads back on and that they would be “monitoring” things closely. But by then, the traffic surge had dropped to a trickle.

Either way — legitimate traffic or not — I think I overreacted by suspending the site. After all, if Google found those clicks to be invalid, they could cancel out 2,000 clicks or 20,000 clicks just as easily as they can cancel out 200, couldn’t they? And if the traffic and clicks were indeed legitimate, I may have just overreacted myself out of a few hundred dollars.

I think in the future, if and when I see any such unexpected traffic surges, I’ll go ahead and report it to Google, but otherwise take no action. If Google decides the clicks are invalid, well, they can’t point a finger at me, because I reported it. And if the clicks are valid, I get to keep the money.