You always hear about how easy it is to get banned by Google, and how hard it is to get unbanned. Sites get thrown into the sandbox, and users get banned from AdSense along with everyone of their properties. Well it looks like Google isn't as unilaterally draconian as everyone accuses them of being -- at least as not as AdSense is concerned.

If you're banned from AdWords, you can fill out a reinclusion form, but like the Spanish Inquisition, you have to confess to having knowingly violated their TOS, even if you haven't. As a thread on Webmasters World noted:

So anyway, I have gone to google’s reinclusion request form to look into submitting a reinclusion request for the site. However, to submit such a request, you MUST agree to a declaration that the site has been spamming (you must agree to: “I believe this site has violated google's quality guidelines in the past.”)

So what do I do? I don’t want to sign a declaration that says we’ve been spammers, because it isn’t true.

Well, a thread on our own forum is painting a different picture for AdSense. A publisher started the thread by repining that he hasn't been able to appeal their decision to ban his site, and feels that the alleged violation is open to interpretation:

Although the titles over the sidebar could conceivably be interpreted to encourage people to click, so can the very fact that they were there. The language was not explicit in any way.

Later on in the thread, however, he indicates that his other properties were similarly violating the AdSense TOS, and continued to do so for about a week after the banned property was, er, banned, and they never banned those sites:

One thing is funny, though. Many of my other sites could've similarly been interpretted as conceivably encouraging users to click on the ads, but Google only picked on this one. I don't know if they just didn't notice the others, but I doubt it. After all, they've all been up for a while, and you'd figure that if you get caught one place, they'd at least skim over your other sites quickly. Mind you, I did change the way that the ads were titled on the other sites, but not for about a week because the e-mail address that AdSense has is one that I don't check frequently.

So it looks like Google didn't just give him a second a chance, but a huge window of opportunity to take it. During an entire week, they either failed to check his other properties (something that seems unlikely given that they deemed one site to be in violation of their TOS), or they gave him ample time to change the other properties to conform.

This is, of course, if we can take his claims at face-value that the original site wasn't anymore in violation of the AdSense TOS than the others. Since he doesn't provide any links, it's hard to determine just how accurate his own account is. If it is accurate, however, it would seem that Google isn't all that keen on banning publishers from its network after all.