HELP - AdSense account disabled
It's gonna be a bit long so bear with me.
I applied and my site got approved for AdSense in the first try. After two months, I got an email that my AdSense account is disabled for policy violations, "Deception Navigation" issues.
I was like huh??
Their email highlighted: Examples of misguided navigation include, but are not limited to:</p> <ul> <li>False claims of downloadable or streaming content</li> <li>Linking to content that does not exist</li> <li>Redirecting users to irrelevant and/or misleading webpages</li> <li>Text on a page unrelated to the topic and/or business model of the website.
So I checked and realised the reason might be due to the old blog posts published (completely different niche) when I first started this website way back. So it was like the posts were visible to Pinterest traffic but were not linked to the homepage etc. I had very little traffic coming from there but I just kept it for the sake of it (portfolio sometimes as I am a writer). So I completely removed them all. I appealed but got rejected.
Also, I don't know how relevant this is but a night before I got the email from the AdSense team, I was receiving many emails from Word Fence that my site was under attack by spam. The next morning I got this email. They didn't even give any warning of any sort or anything. I didn't do black stuff of any sort (like traffic buying or black SEO etc). I don't even know if it's due to what I think it is or if my site really was compromised somehow. But I got no "login successful" from Word Fence so idk?? My old blog posts had no bad links or stuff too. Just normal posts.
I had Google ads on my site through ads inserter and I had uploaded an ads.txt file.
The questions are:
How do I know if it was really compromised since I found no bad links or stuff on my site. I checked most pages. (This might make my case stronger as I have spam attacks email from wordfence but idk if Google even cares.)
Can I remove all ads and delete ads.txt file so I can apply for a new ad network and still fight for my AdSense account? In the appeal section, they ask "Example URLs/App ID's where you've placed your ads*".
How do I get my AdSense back 😭 (it all feels like a bad nightmare)
Please help me figure this out. Thanks in advance.