Dlocks - 10:56 am on Nov 6, 2009 (gmt 0)

A raw number of poor quality violations is used, irrespective of the size of an account.

And they don't look at how long you are using Adwords. If you are using Adwords for about 4 or 5 years you they use the same raw number as for someone that is using Adwords two months. They should look somehow at a percentage of warnings relative to amount of campaigns/adgroups and how long the account is running. Using raw nummbers is bad.

Our experience went like this: 1. First we ever knew about the policy was receiving a final warning. 2. We promote thousands of merchants - so it took about a week to remove every ad group that even has a remote chance of breaking landing page quidelines. 3. We ceased creating new ads or ad groups, so that we could not possibly lose our account. 4. One month later, after 12 hours of wondering why none of our ads are showing, we get the automated email saying our account is disabled.

Amazing, that is almost exactly the same as how my experience (I also only use direct linking to the vendors website):

1. First I ever knew about this new policy was receiving a final warning.
2. Contacted support and asked how to prevent this in the future. Answer: follow the guidelines.
3. Removed each adgroup that had a remote chance of breaking landing page quidelines.
4. I also stopped creating new ads or adgroups so that I could not lose my account. Also checked on a daily basis all keywords and deleted each keyword with QS lower then 5.
5. One month later (yesterday) I see no activity in my account. Via online chat with support they told me my account was suspended.

And I thought after the e-mail I received and after having contact with support about this issue and after removing the campaigns/adgroups and not adding new ones my account was clean.

When Google sends a final warning they should check the whole account so you can remove all adgroups that Google does not like. Currently you get the first and final warning from Google and the warning does not tell which adgroups are affected (you have to guess). You take action and basicly one week later the algorithm can decide:

"Hey, about the first and final warning last week, great you took action and deleted the adgroups but today we de decided that we don't like one other adgroup that was sort of aproved last week. So for this we will ban you for the rest of your life. And yeah we know, in the past week you did not make changes to you landing page, keywords or ads. Today it is still the same website as one the one we aproved last week but that is not our problem."

So yes, there are indeed some problems with this new proces. Perhaps this will be better in the near future. But I think that is to late for people like SuperF and me.