Given this substantial level of forum activity, and by way of being more clear as to why the disabling of accounts is occurring, I have been asked by my colleagues at Google to post the message below:
In keeping with our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we spend a tremendous amount of time and effort monitoring the quality of our search and ad results. As we've stated many times before, Google's primary focus is on delivering the best possible search experience to our end users. To help further this goal, we work with our advertisers in a number of different ways to help them design and run the best ads possible.
Unfortunately, some online advertisers continue to promote services and websites that do not help, and in some cases could harm, our users. For instance, these advertisers may offer free services that bait users into accepting hidden fees. Or these advertisers may attempt to deliver malware to unsuspecting web citizens. Regardless of the practice, these types of campaigns do not benefit our users and we therefore take steps to enforce our policies [adwords.google.com] and prevent such advertisers from running ads through our systems.
Over the last decade Google has implemented a number of systems and processes to identify and disable ads that direct users to these offending websites. However, the ad disabling procedures have resulted in ongoingback and forth between us and these questionable advertisers as they try to outsmart our systems and processes. Therefore, we're being stricter with advertisers who deliver a bad user experience by permanently disabling AdWords accounts that engage in prohibited behavior.
Recently we began implementing this new account disabling. As a result, many advertisers who provide a poor user experience and have previously had their ads disabled will now have their accounts disabled.
We take our user, advertiser and publisher experiences very seriously, and remain dedicated to delivering only the highest quality advertising results to our users. We believe this new process of permanently disabling accounts will markedly improve the overall experience of our users, advertisers and publishers.
AWA
Google has definitely been cutting back on the one-on-one support, and trying to herd people into the forum.
I haven't actually seen a single site or account that has been booted out, not one. So all I have to go on is what the site owner says (and what I understand to be Google's standards) I do know that it's very difficult to be entirely objective about sites that we've worked and sweated and bled over (certainly I'm not)
I also know that Google has made some pretty bone headed mistakes and decisions over the years.
And I know that the minute *anyone* in a forum thread mentions things like lawsuits or Justice departments or any of that, you can abso-freaking-guarantee that you will not see another response from Google in that thread. I'm sure that is policy, as it probably would be for any company. So that is why you will not hear from AWA again on this issue.
Nope, I've been the only one..
Read the other thread "Early Holiday Gift From Google" - there are numerous people with the same experience...
Is the domain that they associate with you in the same niche? Could someone have been accessing it via the same IP number?
Unless someone hacked into my system, that seems highly unlikely.
It very well could be that someone did hack into your system, it is a fact that has happened in the past to other advertisers. If you were hacked, it is very likely that someone did start a campaign to something very shady. If you do find something, you will have to prove it to Google though.
[edited by: trinorthlighting at 10:15 pm (utc) on Dec. 10, 2009]
Yea, it sucks you have to do this. If you actually still want to use AdWords, get over it. The important thing is not to stew and steam, it's to try to get an actual human response and not an automaton.
And I know that the minute *anyone* in a forum thread mentions things like lawsuits or Justice departments or any of that, you can abso-freaking-guarantee that you will not see another response from Google in that thread. I'm sure that is policy, as it probably would be for any company. So that is why you will not hear from AWA again on this issue.
Come on. The concern I raised about the length of time to get a reply to an appeals email is, I think, reasonable and something that should be addressed. It has nothing to do with the lawsuit stuff/conspiracy theories/other junk that some people seem to like bringing up in forums, and which I agree he/she should ignore.
I have had the experience of being told by AdWords that I need to raise my quality score on a keyword by paying more even when the landing page was an in-depth treatment of the keyword. So that's bunk as well, IMO.
Personally, I have not seen any improvement in the search results in areas plagued by crap sites. They still are. I did a search yesterday relating to teeth. I have my search results set to display 100 per page. I went through a whole page, clicking on about 25 pages that looked like they might NOT be junk, and every single site I looked at consisted of a few sentences or a paragraph of junk text run through a lousy translator or a text mixmaster or cadged by someone who clearly had no knowledge of what he was reading and "rewritten" to avoid copyscape, this text set like a turd in the middle of toilet bowl full of adsense ads. This is the results of their new algorithm that sorts the wheat from the chaff?
If you have something you don't want ignored, create a new item and keep legal talk out of it.
Yeah, good luck with that! I think the SI definition of a millisecond is the amount of time it takes for some poster to introduce that kind of talk into any thread on this board. If Google operated that way, they could probably save themselves a job and ignore the entire board altogether.
You seem to like speaking for Google - they have their own mind and I would let them speak for themselves.
If it were true that Google's new algorithm for getting rid of "bad" sites were working, why would they ever need to ban anyone for life? Would not their new spiffy algorithm simply rapidly identify the new "bad" site and kick them out? So that doesn't make sense.
It makes perfect sense in the case of genuine miscreants, or people who claim ignorance of TOS. Why expend even an ounce of extra energy on rehabilitating those people, when there are a boatload of honest advertisers who deserve the resources? I agree 100% with that decision.
The problem lies (as it usually does) in the gray areas in between. It's hard for any of us to know the difference between the scofflaws and the collateral damage, because we do not have access to the facts. It certainly looks like Google has been going after mosquitoes with a cannon. And I don't argue that the language they use in their termination emails is offensive, but they don't write much of anything well (witness the documentation and the learning center)
They may alter their stance in the future and let some advertisers back in, I dunno. I suspect that right now they are under pressure (maybe self imposed) to clean up the ad network, and they overshot.
Doesn't matter. If it's in the same item, he won't respond, nor should he. If you have something you don't want ignored, create a new item and keep legal talk out of it.
This very thread: tons of silly talk about lawsuits on page 3. AWA responds (not to that talk obviously) on page 4.
I rest my case. Let Google speak for themselves; they don't need anyone to tell them what to do.
I have had the experience of being told by AdWords that I need to raise my quality score on a keyword by paying more even when the landing page was an in-depth treatment of the keyword. So that's bunk as well, IMO.
You don't understand Quality Score fully, so rather than dismissing something told to you by an account rep you should try looking into it more
Although your keywords should be included on your landing page, landing page QS is mostly a fail or pass scenario. What has most likely happened to you is that you don't have enough impressions overa certain amount of time to generate a CTR capable of determining your QS. Raising your budget would increase the number of impressions and give you the ability to generate a CTR history capable of generating your QS. (CTR is the most important factor in determining QS, as long as you don't fail on the other counts)
If I am told that the problem is that I either need to make the page be more on the topic of the keyword or raise my bid, and the page is already an in-depth treatment of the topic of the keyword, I think I understand QS *exactly*.
Not sure if we are going to repackage the site with a new URL and account, but I will say that there are many other sites bidding on the same keywords that are doing the exact same as we did. So the ‘bridge page’ excuse is weak at best. We are continuing to add ‘content’ to improve the quality of our site, but not sure if Google is in our future…. This after 9 years of sending them $$$....
GR
Replying directly to the email will send your email to the correct team (whereas contacting support in any other way will not) and I recommend it as the best way to get one's questions and/or concerns addressed.
Is there a ticket system in place or something like that to make sure that replies don't get lost? Not an expert on the subject myself, but usually ticket systems seem to have a code of some sort in the subject line for tracking purposes - we didn't see anything like that...
If I am told that the problem is that I either need to make the page be more on the topic of the keyword or raise my bid, and the page is already an in-depth treatment of the topic of the keyword, I think I understand QS *exactly*.
I believe do you understand it quite clearly.
Plus I want to say Lawsuit, Lawsuit, and Lawsuit. Then eye of newt, tail of lizard etc.etc. That should keep AWA in check for a while.
He's gone because not even he can justify, nor explain the way G is handling account banning.
Having your account disabled for reasons that don't apply to you and then not being able to get any reply from the team responsible after emailing them back as directed is, in my mind, a very legitimate concern.
What about sites you are promoting having ads for sites related to the domain you got in trouble for... Not to mention with cloaking masking and redirecting you can never be 100% certain what is happening on a domain that is not directly under your control, no matter what.
As I've written in the other blog on this topic ("An early gift from Google") all the campaigns we've run were for small local business and that's that. All to very basic websites. We have not used any cloaking or masking - we haven't needed to.
This is why its beyond any doubt in my mind that this a gross error on G side. If you read the other thread (above) you will see numerous other people reporting a similar situation. They were running clean white hat campaigns and got shut down.
This tells me the process was managed by an automated tool that was put together poorly and ended up being a shot gun approach. And to add pain to injury, G did not put in place any basic process for appeal AND the ban is for LIFE?
C'mon - what is this nonsense? For Life? Are we in e-Siberia now? This truly reminds me of the USSR before it all came down.
Replying directly to the email will send your email to the correct team (whereas contacting support in any other way will not) and I recommend it as the best way to get one's questions and/or concerns addressed.
Is this team replying to emails?
It has been two weeks since they disabled our account and we first emailed them - so far all our emails have gone unanswered...
It has been two weeks since they disabled our account and we first emailed them - so far all our emails have gone unanswered...
The same situation here. Long time no answer.
In the meantime we received a lot of emails from them that our ads which are deleted BEFORE FEW YEARS are dissaproved : )))
Big majority of this ads have (Aff.) if you remmeber period when this was actual you can see how old ads are which are now dissparoved! I repeat I deleted this ads long time ago.
Is it possible that Google algorithm counts deleted ads for disabling adwords accounts ?
Unfortunately, some online advertisers continue to promote services and websites that do not help, and in some cases could harm, our users. For instance, these advertisers may offer free services that bait users into accepting hidden fees. Or these advertisers may attempt to deliver malware to unsuspecting web citizens.we reported huge number of websites few months back following this tactics, but cannot find any growth in banning them ?
this advertisors, advertised on our website and were showing ads about registry cleaner, driver updater, etc. which all resulted into malware and corrupted end-users systems.
thanks to efforts from our genuine visitors to report the same.
we reported huge number of websites few months back following this tactics, but cannot find any growth in banning them ?AdWords does not ban websites. AdWords only bans advertisers. So when advertiser 1 is banned and he promoted website X as an affiliate then advertiser 2 can still promote website X.
So instead of reporting those websites you are better of by blocking those websites in AdSense.
