Three years ago I received an email from Google:
In your case, we have detected invalid traffic, and/or other activity which violates our publisher policies, on your account (Publisher Code: pub-X). As a result it has been disabled. Because of this, the ability to serve and monetize through all products which depend on AdSense will also be disabled (for example, AdMob and YouTube).
They continue to explain that information about the issue could be used to circumvent their detection system so they are unable to provide information about specific account activity. They expected me to engage my mind reading powers, analyze traffic logs and submit an appeal. Long story short, my appeal didn't work and I lost the only revenue from all my websites.
I do understand why they want to protect their detection system, but the outcome felt decided from the start. If you didn't do anything intentionally then you have no idea what's the issue and they will not tell you so there is nothing you can do. On the other hand for people that intentionally did something they will know what to change and they already know what detection system caught them doing so basically system favors the bad actors.
I already deleted most of my other websites, now I will be shutting down things related to igorware.com domain as they get to any kind of obstacle because I do not want to waste my time anymore.
Part 1: The Blog
I'm taking down my blog. I was not active for 4 years, even that 4 year old article was mostly written 10 years ago and it was just sitting in draft and waiting for me to polish it up before publishing. So considering I get six times more bot and attack traffic than actual users, I think it’s time to shut it down.
The blog is down to about 1,000 monthly users, most of them reading the ‘From NTFS to RAW and Back’ article. I apologize to any users who might need it in the future, but I believe it will still be available on the internet archive of my blog and in AI of course.