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.

I guess these people don’t really want to keep their AdSense accounts:

* Apologies to I Can Has Cheezburger? Warning: This site will suck you in like a black hole.

But now that they’ve fixed it, they’ve broken something else. Two something elses, apparently.

First, when I load up a report grouped by channels, the channels used to be clickable — i.e., I could click on a channel to get a report specifically for that channel. Now, the channels are no longer clickable.

Second, when I load up a report, I get a pop-up error message while the report is loading that reads, “Error: e_report has no properties.” After I click “OK” the report loads just fine — although I guess it has no properties. Google is apparently concerned about this and thinks I should be too.

I guess it’s possible that Google only changed one thing, and the missing properties are the clickable channels. Or it might be 2 things. I don’t know, and I don’t care.

Dear Google,

I’d like my clickable channels back, please, and I could do without the warning about the e_report not having any properties.

Love,

Me