Google AdWords Forum

Can you elaborate on the privacy policy and about us page? Give some info on what to put in.

However, simply creating a new domain has been enough for some of my campaigns and others to get going again. It would appear in large part that your rate hikes are based on your past bids. Therefore, the creation of your new campaign erased this and Google let you in again.

I'll try to answer your questions as best I can.

What about keywords in the original campaign that tooks hundreds or thousands of dollars to get the CTR up and price down to get ranked #1.
You lose this by going to a new domain and campaign.

You are correct. I lost this by creating a new adwords account, new campaigns and new url. But by bidding with the new account on only our "inactive" listings. I managed to recover our traffic levels to about 90% with the same bids.

Can you elaborate on the privacy policy and about us page? Give some info on what to put in.

Google told me specifically that they wanted increased transparency for the users before they sign up. Under the prior website arrangement users could only find out most of this info after they had signed up.

So in regards to my privacy policy.

1. I wrote down how I was using and storing cookies.
2. I wrote how I was using and storing users email address. ie what they could expect to receive, and that I was using a third party autoresponder (so I also linked to their terms of service)
3. I wrote down how they could remove their email address from our database both manually and automatically.

In regards to the about us page. This was our contact us page and it included.

1. Our office phone number for technical support
2. Our snail mail address.
3. An email support address for technical support

I appreciate your helpful attitude here.
However, simply creating a new domain has been enough for some of my campaigns and others to get going again. It would appear in large part that your rate hikes are based on your past bids. Therefore, the creation of your new campaign erased this and Google let you in again.

The only possibilities I can think of why the new account was allowed was that either i) the new domain was approved by the robot or ii) the robot did not visit the new domain

Also, you're saying they manually reviewed your site and let you back in?

Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying. After four weeks I got a call from my rep saying that they had manually reviewed the old site and decided that it met their guidelines on this subsequent review.

No robot came back to our site. In fact, my server logs reveal that nothing identified as being from google came to our site in that time period.

We've encountered this a few times.
We created a new Adwords account in March for demo pruposes. Very little spend. Stopped & started the account several times.

After 6 weeks of being turned off, I started it again.
No ads & no reason why. Rang our rep & discovered it was "offline pending a manual review".

2 mins later, rep ok'd the site & ads were live again.
Have had this happen on quite a few new Adwords accounts.
Rarely happens with older accounts.

Nothing to do with quality score AFAIK...
It would be logical to try & replace this manual review with an automated check - maybe that's what all the hassle is about in the last 2 weeeks?

It's in their own interest to filter out low-quality pages, regardless of what advertisers pay, as most users won't distinguish between an ad and an 'organic' result.

But ... if they apply the same criteria to AdWords landing pages and pages in the SERPs, the only way to get a page into AdWords would be to create a page that would end up at the top of the SERPs anyway? Wouldn't that eventually kill AdWords?

Okay, I'm being facetious, but there's some truth in the above statement.

And the truth is that Google has no real way to judge the quality of the landing page and probably doesn't care. I did some testing recently creating a new page and an ad linking to it. Each keyword was inactive with a ridiculously high minimum bid. No robot visited the landing page. I tried linking the same ad to a different web page - an established page with more on-topic content and the minimum bids were the same. My conclusion is that Google's algorithm simply decided the keywords aren't worth anything to them.

Impossible for me to provide free links to other webstores selling widgets in my specific niche...

Thanks for the rest of the information. We got the same kind of indications from our 'manual review' .

We have made some changes to our site. Maybe the next 'algo ' visit will improve things..

So, I guess you figure that the comments a google staff member made about a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SITE would somehow apply to your site, some number of months after they were made?

Are you guys completely insane?

Desperate?

Or just not understanding how this works?

Green_grass,

I don't want to link to the competition either, so I link to authority sites that explain more about how widgets work, why are there so many varieties, how do you make the best choice, the future of widgets, etc.

No one said they have to be commercial links. Actually, some of them are, but I make sure they're doing business on another continent ;)

Also, no one minds an incoming, one-way link either.

Plus a few charity links make me feel better and perhaps can help the world in some small way. Although, when the massive earthquake hit Pakistan a few years ago, I put a text appeal at the top of the page. Shortly after, I found I lost one PR point on each of those sites. Couldn't figure out why at first -- apparently irrelevant content. Googlebot has no conscience! All this talk about people needing to rebuild homes, needing food and water must've appeared to be spammy. They've since become graphics!

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Now on "Contact us", no form for me, but I do have to encode the email address. Otherwise I get scraped for so much spam that eludes the junk folder, it will fill my box every day I've found! Hope the 'bot can read this because the harvesters haven't figured out how yet.

I also had to put the company address in a graphic, otherwise the snail mail gets invaded too!

Of course there are rules. And apparently you are an untrained eye, so if your business derives income, wouldn't it make at least some sense to lessen the degree of untrainedness?

Seriously, what gets me is the number of people who don't have a single notion about how things work AND, have no interest in learning. But complains anyway that things don't make sense.

It makes sense with even a minimal understanding, three brain cells to rub together, and some thought.

To me it sounds like the original poster was serving up a page soliciting E-Mail addresses. Seems like E-Mail farming. Voila Google requested more specifics in the form of more content and also contact addresses, so customers could make an informed decision. In other words Google wanted customers to know what they were getting involved in. How trustable was the Ad and did it have the earmarks of a legitimate business. Basically was the ad soliciting for unknown purposes.

I draw my conclusions from what the original poster stated.

> 1. I wrote down how I was using and storing cookies.

2. I wrote how I was using and storing users email address. ie what they could expect to receive, and that I was using a third party autoresponder (so I also linked to their terms of service)

Added a privacy policy link on each page

Added links detailing our services and fees on each page

Shortend up the navigation a tad.

Decreased the visibility of some advertising on entry pages.

Contact us and external links already existed.

Requested a re-review and am holding my breath.

Visitors down about 50%.

And is an email address enough for an affiliate page contact us or about us page? I was thinking of making an about us page with an email. Hope that is enough.

I personally look at the sites i'm promoting, find out what information they'll be collecting, and try to re-assure the users they're going to be safe if they click on one of my sponsors and make a purchase.

If you promote a site that collects e-mails, maybe copy and paste your sponsors privacy policy.

1. so my one little adsense block doesn't hit the Googler in the face right in the visual hotspot and

2. moving it out of the hotspot decreases the CTR a bit and thereby improves the stickyness of the landing page and the site in general slightly.

3. And I want to make sure there is a good sized block of text before the ads so that a bot won't classify the page as MFA - just a theory.