HOWZAT

In my case, PinkNews.co.uk had received very little traffic and consequently very few clicks on advertisements. We're talking in the region of £100 of advertising, hardly the sort of figure someone seriously engaging in click fraud would bother about.

After a number of e-mails to Google without replies and no response from their press office, I decided to cut my losses and concentrate on selling advertising direct to clients, thereby bypassing Google's system.

Then a few months ago, I got chatting about my experiences with Google's AdSense product with some friends in the industry and it became apparent that the false allegations of fraud were not unique to my business. I also learnt that some advertisers claim that money they spent on "fraudulent clicks" was never returned to them.

In order to test Google out, I signed up to Google AdSense once again. I was accepted, despite the fact that they had previously told me in no uncertain terms to never use their products again. I wrote to them to make sure that my site would meet their admission criteria. Trinh, from the American based AdSense team, checked us out and said that we were approved for the ads.

A couple of hundred dollars’ worth of revenue later, once again an e-mail from Google appeared in my inbox. It told me: "It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense account. Please understand that this step was taken in an effort to protect the interest of the AdWords advertisers.

"A publisher's site may not have invalid clicks on any ad(s), including but not limited to clicks generated by:

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive