Visit from Google employee?

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Visit from Google employee?

ohno

7:15 am on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

Two of my sites seem to have been visited by a Google employee, the IP address is 216.239.45.4, I searched that & found this thread from the past :-[webmasterworld.com ]

On both occasions they added an item to the cart & checked out via Google Wallet (did not complete the sale). The visits were only 2 minutes apart over the two sites. These visits were in the early hours of the 10th (4.32AM GMT). Yesterday was poor but then again everyone seems to be in the same boat lately. Has anyone else affected by poor conversions had this IP visit? They also left an email address which was a Gmail account, I'm half tempted to email them!

ohno

9:45 am on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

Call me paranoid but now all our products are disapproved in Google Merchant Centre. That feed has been working fine for months.

engine

12:00 pm on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

Oh, now that's quite a coincidence.

mslina2002

12:28 pm on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

So was the email left on both sites and are they the same email?

ohno

12:36 pm on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

Yes, same email address on both sites.

manny123

1:37 pm on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

I don't know much about Google Wallet from the merchant perspective, but do you think they were testing the Google Wallet integration and found something they didn't like? Perhaps you are not fully compliant with their ToS, privacy policy, etc?

ohno

1:43 pm on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

Well we've had Google Checkout on the site for years, this was then re-branded Google Wallet. If they've found something surely they should communicate it to us?! The Google Wallet account has no issues flagged.

manny123

1:46 pm on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

Informing you would be the nice thing to do, but there's no guarantee they will do that in a timely manner (or even at all). Given that you just lost your approval, it might be worth double checking the ToS just to be sure.

ohno

1:53 pm on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

Our accounts still says approved? (In Google Checkout). Merchant centre says the feed is approved for product ads yet for product search is all disapproved. Products ads = $$$ product search is free in the UK at the moment.....

I hear what you are saying though, they changed the country code & didn't tell anyone, we only found out when testing ourselves that the cart post failed!