Google announced today that is making a bunch of changes to how it handles terminating and/or suspending AdSense accounts, and the related appeals process.

From the sound of it, Google will not be as likely to hand out such harsh punishment as the result of knee-jerk reaction to suspect activity. Google says it has heard the stories about “publishers finding their accounts suspended or even disabled for ‘invalid activity’ without a clear understanding of why or how to fix it.”

“While the vast majority of publishers who sign up for AdSense do so in good faith, unfortunately there are some bad actors out there,” says product management director Jonathan Bellack. “As you can imagine, we can’t reveal all the tools we use to keep bad sites and bad traffic out of our network. But sometimes these tools result in good publishers who become a source of invalid activity having their accounts disabled without much recourse.”

To help fix the issues, Google is now considering tenure more actively when responding to invalid activity it detects. In other words, if you’re a “trusted” publisher, you’ll be more likely to have your account suspended, rather than completely terminated, and there is a new form for “more informative appeals”.

Google is also providing more details about the causes of invalid activity when detected. Google will send emails and notifications to the account with more info and instructions.

Google is also kicking off a series of videos with AdSense tips, and the first one is about the different forms of invalid activity, so go ahead and educate yourself: