Policy refresher: Appeals process

We’re continuing our policy refresher series today, taking a closer look at what happens when we detect content that doesn’t comply with our policies.

As we've talked about often on this blog we maintain a set of policies for AdSense designed to foster a healthy ecosystem and protect our publishers, advertisers and users. The vast majority of content on AdSense publisher sites follows these policies. However, sometimes, our systems do find content that doesn't comply, in which case we'll send a notice to the affected publisher. Notifications can be viewed by signing in to your AdSense account and visiting the Messages page, under your Home tab. Additionally, notifications are sent to the email address associated with your AdSense account. A notification will outline whether it is a site warning/disabling or an account disabling issue. If it is a site warning then you have 72 hours to make changes and do not need to contact us. If your account has been disabled then you should review this help center article to find out more about why we would disable an entire account. The rest of this post will deal with what to do if you receive a site disabling notification.

The first step is to understand the nature of the violation. For more about the different causes and how we define them, you can visit our Help Center and review our program policies.

In some cases, you may be eligible to appeal. If this is the case, please take note of the following considerations in formulating your appeal:

• Make sure you understand the violation: each time we send a notification we include a snippet explaining the violation. If you still have questions following this, our Help Center contains a variety of information on program policies. We also encourage you to seek advice in our Forum - our Top Contributors have a lot of policy knowledge.
• Check your entire site: with each notification we send you a URL as an example of the violation. Keep in mind that this is only an example, the violation may be present on other pages on your site, and we expect you to take appropriate action throughout your entire site. In many cases publishers have found Google’s search operators, specifically the “site:” operator, to come in handy, particularly for content violations.
• Be thorough: we understand that AdSense means a lot to you, and having ad serving disabled may cost you revenue. Take your time when filing your appeal and look through your entire site. Writing a thorough appeal is more important than filing an appeal quickly.
• Tell us how you ensure that this won't happen again: if you were notified about a content violation, tell us what systems you have put in place to ensure that content violating our program policies won't be placed alongside AdSense ads again. Webmasters with large websites might talk about updating filters or hiring human reviewers, while blog owners may tell us that they have familiarized themselves with our adult content policy better, and ensure not to post certain type pictures again.
• Send us examples: were you notified for content violations? In that case send us some example URLs where you removed AdSense ads from. Were you notified because of ad implementation issues? Send us an example URL with your improved implementation - for some cases we will require pages with AdSense ad code implemented, even though ad serving is disabled.
• Err on the side of caution: you may disagree with our decision to disable ad serving to your site, but keep in mind that our policies exist to protect the entire network of users, advertisers and publishers.

We know that your sites are important to you. Please understand that we don't take these decisions lightly. For more information on appeals best practices, take a look at this help center article.

Posted by Dan Zilic - AdSense Team
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