The Online Home of Peter Claridge

October 31st, 2006

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First off: I want it to be know that I really like Google as a company and use and love most of their products.

However, I have to tell everyone about just how utterly vague they are when there’s a problem and it’s driving me nuts!

I make a very nice income from Google AdSense. This program lets me put some text adverts on my site and everytime someone clicks on an advert, I get paid a small amount of money, pretty cool, huh?

I’ve been using AdSense for about 18 months now and do very well off of it. Now in order to protect their advertisers, Google has a lot of rules about what you can and cannot do with your adsense code. For example, you can’t click your own links - even if you are really interested in the advertisers advert. You can’t ask your friends or visitors to click your links to ’support your site’ and various other things like that.

I have AdSense code on well over 200 websites, some don’t earn much, others earn a lot. But it all adds up

The other day I got a message from the Google AdSense team stating that they had detected fraudlent clicks and traffic to one of my sites and if I didn’t stop it I would have my account closed down.

Hello Peter Claridge,

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have
been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of
third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit
your site. Such programs may include, but are not limited to auto-surf,
pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.

This is seriously bad news for me, as I rely on AdSense for a good part of my income. However I know that I’m only using natural organic search engine results to generate traffic and I’m certainly not stupid enough to encourage people to click on my ads - I know that’s a fast track way to get your account shut down.

So I sent them an email back asking for specific information so I can just take down the site. It seems like a reasonable request, right? They are telling me there’s a problem, I need to know where the problem lies.

I rapidly fire off an email asking where the problem is and wait nervously for the reply, praying that it’s not with one of my higher earning sites.

The reply comes back…

As you know, Google treats instances of invalid click and impression activity very seriously. As a reminder, we cannot disclose any details about how our monitoring technology works or what specifics we found on your account. However, we can assure you that we have thoroughly re-reviewed your account, and have confirmed that your account violated our program’s Terms and Conditions.

Hmm…

So now Google is saying that “look, there’s a major problem on your account and it could cause you to lose your account, but hey, we can’t actually tell you what the problem is because it’s much more fun to leave you guessing”.

I reply back asking some more questions about their ToS, they reply with even more vagueness than before!

Aragh! Google, you are killing me!

Today I took down over 150 websites that I don’t monitor in the hope that it’s something to do with them. I also removed the code from my highest earning website, just in case ;-(

A colleague of mine had his account shut down a couple of months ago, but they didn’t even give any warning. He only had 2 forum/community websites and he had over a years worth of earnings saved up. EEK!

If anyone in the UK here’s a feint scream along the lines of “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo” then don’t worry, it’s just me finding out that Google has shut down my AdSense account

Posted in AdSense | 4 Comments »

October 27th, 2006

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Oh man, I hate tying myself down to posting on a particular day like I did yesterday. I have no inspiration to write. But I said I would, so here goes…deep breath…

So after Anand’s humiliating put down by the beggar girl (literally a case of “drink up, Trigger, we’re leaving”) we went off to the Agriya Bangalore office (Photos - opens in a new page).

After disturbing the workers we headed on out to find a hotel where this birthday party was taking place.

Originally we meant to stay only until about 8pm, but they hadn’t served the food by this time, and there was no way Aravind was leaving without some free food! (just kidding mate!).

For any of you Western Infidels out there reading this blog, I thought I’d mention that birthday parties are celebrated just the same way as back home in the UK. Even the Happy Birthday song is sung in English.

After eating far too much good food we eventually left just after nine to start the long journey back.

Eventually got back to Chennai around 3.30, Aravind had a little run in with the curb while doing a u-turn in the SUV. He says that the curb lept out of nowhere and no one saw him do in and infact the curb hit him. That’s his story. And he’s sticking to it.

Since I’m totally hardcore and just like the duracell bunny, I decided to take the Wednesday off work due to fatigue :~)

OK, so in other cool news and totally unrelated to Bangalore: I’ve been invited to my first wedding! One of my freshers, her brother (whom I’ve never met) is getting married next week and I got an invitation! I felt so…hmm, I don’t know what I felt, but it was one of those emotion things.

So yeah, I think that’s all I have to report for today. Another week is over. Tomorrow I should have been flying up to Orissa, but torrential monsoon rain has pretty much flooded Eastern India, so that’s been called off until a later date. Instead I will be in the office doing some interviews for data collectors as part of my new joint venture with Agriya Infoway.

Goodbye

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October 26th, 2006

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On the 23rd October, myself, Aravind and Anand took a little road trip to Bangalore - India’s tech capital.

If you’ve ever phoned up customer support for a company and someone with an Indian accent answered, then chances are the person on the other end of the line was sitting in a call centre in Bangalore.

Bangalore is also home to some of India’s biggest home grown corporations, including Infosys and Wipro. It is also the Indian headquarters for many international corporations such as Oracle, IBM and HSBC.

The trip to Bangalore takes about 6 hours by car, so we arranged to leave by about 4pm on the Monday, but since Indian’s seem to be even more laid back than American’s, it was more like 6.30pm by the time we left.

The journey was pretty uneventful, except maybe the ‘hotel’ where we stopped to eat. Not your typical 5 star hotel!

When we got to Bangalore, it was about 1am and we were dropping off Aparnaa’s father when a police patrol decided to come and see why 2 Indians and an Englishman were hanging around a street corner at 1 o clock in the morning. They didn’t seem to want to leave us alone - but eventually they got bored and left us.

On the Tuesday we went into Bangalore and to a shopping centre called The Forum. It was absolutely heaving: think Bluewater the weekend before Christmas. At the shopping centre it was all Western chain shops and designer stores. There was even a Lush store! (I guess only my housemate will know what a Lush store is).

So after a traditional Indian lunch of a McChicken with fries (they don’t eat beef, so I had to be a little bit crazy and not have my usual quarter pounder but try something new), we spent the afternoon wondering through the designer stores and electrical stores.

In the afternoon, one of the funniest things happened, although as with everything that is hilarious, you probably had to be there to find it funny.

Basically, Aravind, Anand and I were walking down a brand infested street in Bangalore when a begger girl (probably around 20) came up to me and started pestering me.

I couldn’t shake her off, Anand came to try and rescue me but she wouldn’t stop following, bending down infront of me grabbing my trousers (honestly! We’d barely just met). Eventually Anand took out his wallet and held out his hand with some money. She looked him up and down before completely blanking him and coming back to me!

Apparently Englishman’s rupees are better than India man’s rupees.

Naturally we came up with all the ladish jokes about Anand’s way with the women, but I couldn’t possibly print them here (my mother reads this blog you know!).

I guess I’ll finish the next part of the Bangalore trip tomorrow. Too tired to keep on writing.

Good night

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October 25th, 2006

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OK, I’ve listened to all your feedback and after an overwhelming response from my mother, I’ve conceeded that what everyone is crying out for is new photo’s of India!

So, in order not to disappoint, I have added tonnes of new photos for your viewing pleasure. Yes, they even come complete with my unique blend of unfunny humour. Woot!

Check out my Bangalore Photos here

Check out some Monsoon Photos here

I’ve actually just got back from Bangalore today. I had a great time and will do a proper write up about it tomorrow.

Bye

Posted in India | 1 Comment »

October 21st, 2006

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And in other news. Welcome to World War III. Or at least that’s what it feels like with fire crackers and bangers going off all over the city - 24/7

You may have thought that by 3am they’d be getting bored of a few bangs, but oh no. They can, and will, keep going all night.

They line up row upon row of crackers, set a fuse and one end and the whole line of crackers goes off one after another. Sometimes it’s like a minute of continuous cracking.

Diwali, incase you didn’t know, is the Hindu equivalent to the Christian’s Christmas. Diwali means Festival of Light and the fire crackers are set off in celebration of this.

The family tried to get me into a traditional Indian dress (no, not the saree!), but I cited religious grounds for not going ahead with it

Last night, Aravind was entertaining two other clients from France at the family home - a father and son. The father originally came from the Chennai area, but left when he was about 10, and now he’s looking to come back and get his son Indian Citizen status.

People seem to be returning to India more and more nowadays, where once you had the “brain drain” where the brightest people went off to Europe and America, the younger generation is going off to these countries to get the education and returning to India to work for the Indian corporations or set up their own businesses. Given the cheaper cost of everything here, you can certainly enjoy a better standard of living that you could do on an equivalent income in Europe or America - and that’s probably the attraction for most people to return to India.

Getting back to Diwali, it’s a day of family and celebration, and what better way than to go to the cinema and sit in silence with your family for 2 hours. It avoids all the customary family arguements that go hand in hand with family gatherings

The rest of this blog post is just for search engines (google, yahoo etc), so please ignore (that means you can stop reading now)!

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