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
There have been manual reviews of banned accounts already.
Just your opinion. And unfortunately it's a worthless opinion unless you work for the LPQ team at Google.
If you read AWA's posts AWA already stated teams have looked at the accounts already.
Boh. Where on earth did he say this? (Saying that the reviews are complete would incidentally also imply the bans are complete, which I'm sure Google will never say!). I did see an interview of a Google exec in the news saying that all ban appeals emails would get at least an ack, and apparently some people haven't even received the ack yet, let alone a review...
Every site I have seen that has been banned has violated the new FTC laws of disclosure.
Do you somehow get so see all "sites" that were banned? Again, meaningless statement unless you work for the LPQ team at Google. By the way, it's accounts being banned, not sites. Get the facts straight.
I'm sure violating the FTC rules is not a good idea, but there's no basis for saying that any accounts, let alone all accounts, were banned because of that reason. Maybe some were.
Dude, you and a bunch of other posters are just making stuff up at this point, with all due respect...
Every site that I have seen, that does not mean ever single site. FYI..We are not making stuff up, we are reading statements.
The reviews have already been done and AWA stated it in this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
The suspensions and final warnings that are referenced in this thread are due to account level actions taken against advertisers who've submitted multiple sites that violate our landing page quality guidelines. This is an existing policy to discourage repeat offenders by taking account level action. These final warnings and suspensions were only applied to sites with multiple violations which were MANUALLY REVIEWED to ensure that our policies were being applied correctly.
I want to challenge anyone who really does not know why they were banned to post up an entire list of every site you advertised for in the "Review my site" section of webmasterworld and ask people why you were banned. You will get honest responses from people.
These final warnings and suspensions were only applied to sites with multiple violations which were MANUALLY REVIEWED to ensure that our policies were being applied correctly.
That quote is about manual reviews prior to Google banning somebody, not appeals reviews subsequent to the ban.
Nope, it is about Google checking to make sure they were banning the correct accounts. That is why no one is getting a review and none of you here have had a reply or account turned back on with Google. You can appeal all you want and Google will send you a canned response
The AWA quote predates the appeals process creation, which came later in November and was announced by Google in an interview with Nick Fox (look it up). It has nothing to do with it. Google promised an appeals process in the Nick Fox interview, and that all emails would get a reply.
Like I said, you don't have your facts straight and you're making things up about what Google will or will not do. (I don't mean to pick on you - many people on this board fit the same description.) Google answers to Eric Schmidt, not to you or anyone else.
You can argue with me all you want, google does a review when an appeal is sent and everyone who was banned is getting a canned response. This was a calculated move on Google's part and they are not changing their mind about it.
Sigh... that statement is wrong again, on both counts. (1) Many who were banned and appealed are still waiting for a response (no canned response either) - see other postings on this board. (2) Some who were banned succeeded in getting their accounts back after contacting/messaging Google - see other postings on this board.
Reinstating the accounts of incorrectly banned people is good business for Google and I personally think that is what they will (eventually) do.
BTW, if people say they are out of the US and this does not apply, I would think twice. In Google's TOS it mentions that adwords agreement is covered under California law which these FTC rules apply.
That's not true for UK users - I can't speak for other countries. Our 'edition' of the TOS specifies English law.
Edit... hmm that's obviously not how to do quotes...
A lot has already been said about 'Free Trials'. I still see some 'free trials' being promoted on adwords but its only a matter of time before they go.
Also, a lot of clickbank products have also been slapped under the category - 'Charging for something that is available for free' and 'miracle cures'.
That is if you advertise in the US, that US law applies.
La_Valette, These accounts are not coming back, you are basing hope on some very wishful thinking.
That will give you a bit better picture about what gets hit.
You'll also find posts from Google's employees where they shed more light onto what it means being banned.
[google.com...]
So we standing by awaiting the response from support; started with AdCenter in meanwhile.
1. we received a canned reply
2. adding of "buy" links had no effect
3. removing whatever free/trial had no effect
we then started reverting most recent changes, and
4. removal of the "about us" page restored the quality score as soon as the bot re-checked the site.
Are you saying your quality score was restored by removing your about us page? That seems unlikely to me unless there was something really objectionable on that page. Seems you have been making quite a few changes and perhaps it isn't clear which change restored the quality...
4. we did change multiple pages to add "buy" links, remove free/trial, and deployed that batch of changes. we also changed AdWords ad texts to remove "free"/"trial".
5. we then waited a couple of days, receiving a canned reply in meanwhile.
6. then, we took down the about page and all the links to it, and had a quality score restored about 18 hours after deploying that change.
The lading page bot fetches at least the landing page (and sometimes multiple linked pages) approximately every 12 hours. I also confirmed that the bot did actually fetch the "about" page before we got an 1/10 QS.
For us, it is pretty clear that we triggered some sort of a fraud / low quality metric by that page. Either something was not present that must be present on every about page; or there was something that should not be on the about page.
Now we only need to figure out what it was; I suppose it would be a trial and error process. Btw how many attempts do we have before we get banned? Is this an established number, hehe?
6. then, we took down the about page and all the links to it, and had a quality score restored about 18 hours after deploying that change.
It could be coincidence as somebody from AdWords actually checked your site and manually restored QS.
However, I do not see how we can prove if there was, or was not, a manual review, even if we are able to identify each visitor. Because we do not know if the AdBot is pure machine or relays some data to a live person.
I'd rather believe in alien invasion than in manual QS 1/10 checking.
But you mentioned canned replies which tells us you were emailing Google about your problem.
That's more than enough to have somebody over there actually take a look into your site. It may just be that it takes time.
Many who were banned and appealed are still waiting for a response (no canned response either) - see other postings on this board.
Hopefully AWA will be able to do something about this when he returns... of course, the more important thing than sending out responses is actual reinstating of any accounts which shouldn't have been banned to begin with.
The fact of the matters is this: When google's revenue continues to climb 100% every quarter. Google must be doing something right.
So why would they change anything to make you feel a little better? I know if I am google, I wouldn't change a damn thing.
So save your breathes. I am also a banned adwords advertiser, now i just concentrate on Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing, I know i won't get as much results as I get with adwords, but it's better than losing my dignity begging to pay money to google.
So why would they change anythinI don't know why they changed the guidelines/policy and suddenly started banning a lot of their clients. ;)
"If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or it's performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our webmaster guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site. Request reconsideration of your site."
Is this just for organic search reconsideration? Has anybody had any luck with this?
(www google com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843)
So why would they change anything to make you feel a little better? I know if I am google, I wouldn't change a damn thing.
They should reinstate incorrectly banned accounts because it is the right thing to do. I think doing the right thing is a big deal to Google, and it should be.
I think doing the right thing is a big deal to Google, and it should be.
Your joking right?
That might of been true pre IPO days but is certainly not now. The only thing Google gives a dam* about now is making money and keeping the stockholders happy. They could care less if it's the right thing or not and if you think otherwise, then keep enjoying the koolaid.
That's why there should be some kind of appeals system for this. So far, it doesn't seem there is, unfortunately.
If this were a trip I am sure this account would have been long gone.
History of the account has more to do with the banning than some of the thoughts here.
Some of the accounts that seem to be caught up in this may have a bad history of throwing up bad ads to landing page and Google is just plain tired of investing time and money in reviewing bad ads.
The ones that have been banned and have appealed with no response in a week (just a guess)are most likely done and will get nothing but a canned response.
The appeal is like submitting to DMOZ you submit and wait. If you continue to resubmit it only hurts more than helps.
I know some rather large accounts have been banned but we don't know the history of their accounts. It could be 100's if not 1000's of poor ads being built that caused the banning, or an employee was working on other sites from the company IP and caused this damage.
We don't know if they outsourced some work to bad IP's and got caught up from this.
Banning is the last resort to a troubled account so I am sure there was some serious thought put into this before it started.
If you have had some bad history I would make sure before submitting new ads they are good quality ads that go to quality landing pages otherwise your history will come back to haunt ya.
