Google denies defrauding AdSense partners

A top Google executive shot waded into an online forum popular with developers on Tuesday to shoot down a claim that the company was defrauding partners in its AdSense program.

Matt Cutts, Google's head of the Web spam team, took to Hacker News to deny claims made by an alleged ex-Google employee that the company has engaged in widespread fraud of its AdSense partners.

After speaking with people who work on the AdSense team, Cutts said that the claims of fraud were a "conspiracy-laden fake, from the typos to wrong terminology to untrue policies to the lack of specific names of people."

AdSense is a major partner network for Google that accounts for about a quarter of Google's revenue. The anonymous accuser described on PasteBin claimed first-hand knowledge of a purported scheme that started in 2009 to cancel AdSense accounts just before payouts to prevent publishers from collecting money that Google owed them.

"We were told to begin banning accounts that were close to their payout period (which is why account bans never occur immediately after a payout). The purpose was to get that money owed to publishers back to Google AdSense, while having already served up the ads to the public," reads the accusation.

The alleged Google policy included a color-coded plan detailing when to block or approve different kinds of AdSense subscribers, called AdSense Quality Control Color Codes.