Maybe if we all initiated a chargeback going back a year that would wake them up. Now that's just me venting and I have no intention of doing any such thing...for now anyway. I don't want to actually act like the crook they are making me out to be. I'm still hopeful they will go back over this and get it corrected for all the honest people caught up in this.
Just before Christmas...can you believe this? They couldn't have picked a worse time to do something like this. Do No Evil indeed. This is a pure witch hunt
Do no Evil?
What do these banned affiliate Adword accounts have in common? Country of origin? Product type? Destination host country?
What do these banned affiliate Adword accounts have in common? Country of origin? Product type? Destination host country?
And those that are not affiliate...
Not much has been shared so far...
After over a half dozen years and many MILLIONS spent in advertising you banned us.
On a human level, the situation you're describing is obviously very frustrating and disappointing.
So what do you think you'll do next? (honest question)
Presumably you have investments and savings and live below your means, so not having much in the way of revenue for the time being won't be too much of a hardship?
Do No Evil indeed. This is a pure witch hunt
That assumes Google means their paid customers like us when they say the "do no evil" thing but in reality they mean their "real" customers...the searchers. They can and will do evil against anyone but them.
You can work with. An agwncy. They have direct contact with google. When I worked at an agency and I was able to get bans removed. Google told me what rhe problem was. I fixed it and told google. They resubmitted it to the spam team and it was removed the ban.
I wish this were the case as the agencies I've worked with and have contacts with are getting pretty much nowhere these days. If anything the close direct relationships agencies have seem to back firing for some of their clients.
They alert Google to some things with a particular account and suddenly a chain reaction of more problems start to magically happen after Google gets a closer look.
Personally, I don't want anyone with any kind of relationship with Google near anything I do.
Question....What do these banned affiliate Adword accounts have in common? Country of origin? Product type? Destination host country?
Seems to be Landing Page Quality Score, something that many of us had never previously heard of, something that the was never penalized previously except for higher click costs. Suddenly there is capital punishment, even if the offence occured years ago, no rights of appeal, and the policy was never announced.
It has arisen from Google's battle with spammers, and Google's tactic of being as secretive as possible, so that spammers don't learn how to beat Google. A lot of good customers have lost their accounts in the war against spam.
The solution is using humans rather than algorithms, but that will cost Google $$ and they have only got a few billion in the bank.
Every dollar the middlemen earn is a dollar Google doesn't keep and/or the end advertiser doesn't save. Google wants to maximize their revenue from Adwords AND deliver the advertising with the best ROI for the advertisers. Note: If you are a middleman than you are not the advertiser, you are an agent spending money on behalf -directly or indirectly- of the advertiser.
Smart pricing, quality scores, etc are all meant to eliminate the middlemen so that Google keeps a larger share of each ad dollar and passes more savings on to the end advertiser. If you are spending money on AdWords and you aren't marketing your own product, Google wants to eliminate you from the Adwords platform.
The arbitrage gravy train was nice while it lasted but if you were fool enough to convince yourself it was permanent, well, I have some sub-prime mortgage pools I want to talk to you about.
Lastly, someone will surely try and make the argument that middlemen drive up the click price thereby making Google more money per click. This was true before smart pricing. Smart pricing is designed to set a price floor to clear out the middlemen.
I'll even send them a 'canned' email telling them that
"We have found your service to be egregious in it's repeated collection of money for clicks that are highly suspect in nature. Due to this and other indicators that we can not divulge for security reasons we have decided to reverse all charges going back to 120 days.
If you contact us again we will ignore your emails and requests for contact and any future charges will also be reversed.
Go BING!
We are now seriously considering it as that would be quite a bit of money back we can spend in other ways.I payed AdWords always afterwards (not via CC) and also considered not paying my last bill (worth $50,000) that I received from them and see where it would end. But in my country Google could get the money very easily within a couple of weeks via legal ways. Perhaps in the US you have more options.
"We have found your service to be egregious in it's repeated collection of money for clicks that are highly suspect in nature. Due to this and other indicators that we can not divulge for security reasons we have decided to reverse all charges going back to 120 days.Did you really send that to them? :PIf you contact us again we will ignore your emails and requests for contact and any future charges will also be reversed.
So ..as regards removing the middlemen ..
Why leave the big shopping comparison sites and the fake B2B sites ?
Could it be that they spend way way more than the little guy affs ..cynical me ..wonders
Does it help the advertiser ?
Not according to the hundreds of advertisers ( whom I have spoken to trying to source product over the last two weeks ) who are the actual manufacturers of the products ..and yet still are being told by Google that the only way to beat the "whitelisted" big dog affs and the fake B2B sites that Goog allows to run ads on their names and products and trademarks ..is to up their bids ..
Nope ..surfers dont benefit ..nor do advertisers who actually make things ..
Who does benefit ? ..google ..and the big dog affs and fake B2B sites and ebay ..and all the self appointed adwords pros who suggest that what the people who got kicked out really need is tha eyes of an adwords pro ( hint "themselves" ) to look over their account and try to "see what went wrong" ..for a fee of course ..
And of course Google are really going to reinstate an account because an adwords pro says that they have looked at the account and can see why ..
Reminds me of the pitches run by cults and "I'll square you with god religions" ..taking advantage of the lost , confused ..and in some cases abused .
googs serps and adwords needed cleaning ..( but they encouraged the crap just to get the data )..they have not cleaned up ..they have just removed the little guys and some innocent bystanders ..and left some self styled "pros" hinting that they can maybe revive dead accounts ..
it all leaves a bad taste ..even to those of us who dont use adwords ..
Anyone lamenting the fact that Google has cut them out as middlemen should have been banking cash all this time and thinking of new business models that are more defensible than arbitraging traffic on AdWords. Paid search has had a market inefficiency on which arbitragers were able to capitalize the past 8 years. That inefficiency is getting less and less inefficient by the day. I don't wish business pain on anybody but marketers who act surprised that Google views arbitragers as adding little value have been asleep at the wheel. They have been sending and resending that message almost since inception.
In the end, the less you own your traffic the less defensible your business is. The more dependent you are on buying traffic the more defenseless your business is.
Does it leave a "bad taste" as you mention? Sure it does. Capitalism is ruthless. When you are on the wrong side of it, it hurts.
Or the flip side is, many marketers have been able to earn a ton of cash exploiting Google Adwords' inefficiencies for a long time. Those profits should have been invested in traffic channels that are not dependent on Paid Search. It's called spreading your risk.
My point is not to defend Google but to point out that a business built arbitraging paid search is a high risk business. There was/is great money to be made in paid search but high return comes with high risk.
Google is no joy to deal with and a case can be made that they are much more close to evil than not. They could likely handle moves like this better as well but the decision to cut out the middleman itself is just plain smart business.
Their problem is not in the short term, but rather long term. To steal a phrase from their own book, "they have poked the bear" and now that bear, the bear being the large masses of webmasters and business owners that have made Google what it is, are now turning way from them and they are spreading the word. It will take time, but the shift in search dominance will come and Google will no longer be calling the shots because they have become the more evil of the two players.
All I can say is, it's about time.
the decision to cut out the middleman itself is just plain smart business.
Sounds like more of a conspiracy theory to me - I doubt there's any such decision on Google's part. Their stated objective is to improve landing page quality here.
The automated way in which this is being done does need work IMHO - it seems like there are many false positives being generated. I can only hope Google has a good appeals process in place now and that appeals will be handled quickly so that the false positives will have their accounts restored asap.
Agreed that any business that depends on PPC is built on shaky ground ..however Google seems to be shoring up some of the very worst whilst hitting some of the least offensive ( albeit irritating ) ..and hitting many directly advertising businesses that use no middlemen ..
If you knew how many more middlemen there are in the average transaction in France compared to the USA or the UK ..and how frustrating that is when one wants to find a real manufacturer or importer here via the yellow pages ( where any corner shop is allowed to list itself as an international manufacturer ..if it pays the adspace ) or the Goog serps ( organic or ads here have far more shopping sites and fake B2B than in anglophone countries ) ..they need to clean up the entire system ..and what goog is doing is pretending ..it's window dressing ..and is far from automatic ..the "whitelisting" is blatant ..
I have no problem with capitalism ( unlike many of those who live where I do ) ..my problem is with cronyism and corruption and hypocrisy ..and in throwing real actual manufacturers and not middle men under the fake bus of cleaning up adwords
How could selling music instruction books and dvd's be poor quality
Is there anything on your site that is in a connection to one or more other sites?
Anything like submission forms, cart, etc...
I had one site which had low quality. The reason for low quality I had already determined was because I was using a 3rd party email provider for my email list. For some reason they don't like that I am sending people to that site to sign up for the email list. This site has a small signup to the email list section on the page. There is no free software or malware or anything like that. In fact the whole site is completely white hat, there is no issue with it. I already discussed the low quality with them and they made some suggestions and I was in the process of implementing those suggestions.
There are no affiliate programs on any of my sites.
All of the sites are completely white hat, very nice, great value. They are not affiliate sites, they are simple stuff like a job search site for example.
I just sent them a really angry reply.
I'm also thinking now of removing myself from all google services including gmail as I think google cannot be trusted. Perhaps they will shut down my email account for no reason also.
This is completely rude and unacceptable.
