How about exponentially increasing ban times, instead of a life-time ban after the third strike? (Perhaps with even a cooling off period, if you behave well for some time.)

That's a brilliant idea, really.

I wonder how we could generate an economic incentive for Google to adopt it.

The only way to do that would be for a competitor to implement it and begin gaining traction because of it. Right now, the cost of the wrongfully terminated is less than the cost of wrongfully terminating them and probably always will be unless Google starts loosing people afraid of being wrongfully terminated. That number becomes much larger.

Want to incentivize Google? Convince Bing to implement it and see if Adsense customers convert as a result. If I felt Bing was treating their customers/vendors (ads is a really weird relationship :) better, I would consider using it (since as a search product it has approached Google pretty close).

The problem is that Google's customer is not the site that carries the banners, but the advertiser who wants their banners shown. Unless those gravitate towards an ad network that coincidentally provides better service to site owners, those folks are doubly screwed.

But Google still needs their sales channel, which is why Bing may be a viable option for this.

I won't weigh in on this specific incident because I'm not familiar with the details, plus it's on the ads side, not the search quality side.

But I can weigh in on the "make the action exponential" idea. Regarding the steps that the webspam team takes, we take stronger and stronger action as we see repeated violations or violations with more willful or damaging intent.

Hidden text might result in a 30 day removal, for instance (and the site can always remove the hidden text and do a reconsideration request before the 30 days is up, of course). But if we see the site repeatedly violating our guidelines or doing worse stuff, then the action is stronger.

Do you inform people of that? I mean, do you inform people that they will be removed for 30 days and unless they put things right they will be banned for longer?

Or do you remove them and not tell them at all, leaving them in the dark completley?

Great question, Andrew. We typically do inform people they'll be removed for hidden text for 30 days. We also tell people how to file a reconsideration request to come back in sooner. I did the query ["hidden text" 30 days reconsideration request] and here's an example email from the #1 result: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020315.html

You can read the whole message that we send, but the relevant part would be "In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from somewifi.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-.... When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=e... to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration."

As infractions get more serious and we believe that the SEO/site owner is more willful, we give less information to the people who do spammier things.

Hope that helps to answer your question.

Ironically (given the recent hubbub), I think that's how 4chan does it.

I think the biggest issue is they don't want a feedback loop where people can "test" the system and find ways to beat it.

Wow maybe this could be a black hat strategy. Find a target and click fraud them until they get banned. Maybe he was a victim of this method. If I relied on Ad-sense, I would be concerned about this.