[jfoster]

The crazy thing is that Google even took this action despite it also being against their interests. Sure, your business specifically is relatively inconsequential to them, but they must've made hundreds of thousands of similar mistakes. That's a fair amount of ad inventory to miss out on, surely?

Google accounts have enough worth & history associated with them that they should be able to create some kind of appeal process whereby if you jump through the right hoops proving identity and such, you could eventually reach a human who can intervene?

It feels like they're religious about the idea of having an algorithm decide everything. Works pretty well for some things, but they sure do burn some customers/clients pretty badly along the way for other things.

[ALittleLight]

One possible problem is that there are always more people willing to step in. I assume that I can still find a Japanese to English dictionary by searching Google. If one, or N, such websites get taken out by algorithmic flaws or bad actors reporting competitors, then others will simply rise up and take their place (or Google will subsume their content into the instant answers section). In this way, Google may not really be losing anything even if they are constantly burning their partners - there are always new partners coming up.

[marshallbananas]

Yup. And since almost everyone is using AdSense it doesn't make much difference to them. The funny thing is that my AdSense ban didn't affect the SERP position at all. I was still the second result for "japanese dictionary" on Google and had a steady million pageviews a month for years.

[CPLX]

> since almost everyone is using AdSense it doesn't make much difference to them

You’ve hit on the actual problem. This is why so many believe the real fundamental problems the culture is facing with tech companies start with antitrust enforcement.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, see how in the article, the guy is planning to 'spend his next 1-2 weeks fighting this case' instead of giving Amazon the ultimatum that if they don't fix this quickly, he's going to take his business elsewhere !

[xnx]

This is good evidence of the strict separation of algorithmic and advertising systems.

[mysterydip]

Were there any other ad networks you used in place of adsense? That seems like a lot of pageviews to leave on the table.

[jfoster]

They are still losing impressions, though? We're talking about getting delisted from Adsense, not Google search.

[tinus_hn]

Googles interest is block and move on. It is not in their interest to have a person look at a case like this.

[jfoster]

But then they have fewer ad impressions to sell. That said, since their system is an auction, some level of scarcity does potentially increase their revenue. Maybe they've done that calculation and figured out that they wanted to dump some of their inventory.

[tinus_hn]

To pay for the 15 minutes it would take a person to look at this issue and fix it they’d need a lot of impressions. Far more than they lose by just blocking the site.