A Yahoo Answers user has been emailing me for weeks asking about the contextual advertising program Google Adsense. We run Adsense here at PowerHomeBiz.com and it’s an advertising program that has worked really, really well for us.

After several back and forth of emails where I explained to him how the program works and offered him tips on how he could earn more from the program, he finally said that he’s been clicking on his own ads. Not just once or accidentally, but every day. In fact, he even goes to various cyber cafes in his city just to click on his own ads. He’s got a new website — a site that at first glance has no value added and created merely to earn from Adsense. No wonder he complains that his site does not get any traffic.

I patiently explained to him that he needs to stop as Google will eventually catch his cheating ways. He persisted, even arguing that he goes to several cyber cafes, not just one per day, so the IP address changes.

This morning, he emailed me saying that Google kicked him out of Adsense because of invalid clicks, and that I was right all along. I couldn’t pass up the chance to say “I told you so.”

I can understand how the prospect of earning money simply by clicking on own ads can push a publisher to the “dark side” and click on their ads themselves. There’s the lure of easy money. Or merely to check whether the program can indeed earn money for the publisher. Just monitoring the types of questions in Yahoo Answers regarding Adsense shows that many are clicking on their own ads.

However, be prepared for payback time. In Adsense case, the dreaded “you’ve been booted” from the program email. The main responsibility of advertising programs is to their cash cow — the advertiser. And they need to protect the integrity of their program, part of which is to ensure that publishers are not generating invalid clicks for the purpose of inflating their earnings.

I told this Yahoo Answers user to forget about Adsense, and simply apply to other programs. But always to remember the lesson from Adsense — that he can get kicked out if he cheats again.