Reporting abuse does nothing

Its frustrating

[sandyeggo]

I have a competitor that buys the same exact adwords term for 2 websites - One website #1 is the real site, the other site #2 is a doorway site, and all of the links on site #2 point to main website #1. The ads are displayed at the same exact search results in positions 1 thru 3. I have reported this to google multiple times over a period of months without any action. So is reporting abuse worthless? This abuse report is obvious, and think google should remove any links on their own site for reporting abuse if they aren't going to review the reports we send, so not to waste even 10 minutes of my day any more.
Has anyone been successful with a similar report?

[netmeg]

Nobody knows for sure, because even if they do act, Google will not (and should not) discuss anyone else's account with you. What you describe goes on a lot (and there's even more sophisticated ways of doing it involving whole networks of computers) I suspect Google knocks them out when they find them. But they have to do a thorough investigation first (which is good - you don't want them tossing people out willy nilly)

Report it once and move on. They're not wasting your ten minutes by having the link up; you choose to report it.

I don't even bother anymore unless it's something really horribly egregious, and I haven't personally seen one of those in a couple years.

[ogletree]

I have a client that has a competitor that does this with 5 adwords accounts.

[smallcompany]

Long ago, I also had a bad experience about similar issues. Something obvious that does not get resolved.

I was pressing my reps very hard for not being able to give me an answer.
Finally I requested to talk to somebody from policy team. And it happened, and the reply was that they do take a look into this stuff, but I still did not get an answer onto why particular cases were no resolved. When I asked about time needed, the answer was anywhere between 24 to 72 hours depending on the case.

All after all, while I saw some stuff taken down, not all was gone, and I was still coming across things that were a very obvious "no, no".

The biggest problem I had with such stuff was that I was losing tremendous amount of time in gathering data about this, plus I was under big stress simply because I'm that type of a person - I can't stand when something obviously is wrong and has to be fixed, yet the authority is blind, on purpose or not (don't really know).

Once I lost my team, and somehow stopped working on some of the campaigns that were susceptible to irregularities and violation of AdWords' TOS, I moved on and felt way, way better about my business.

Man, when I just remember... I would get squeezing feeling in my chest and my arm would go numb while on the phone with my rep, and poor girl (I believe so) couldn't do anything as that was for the policy team (they'll never admit that, but I do have more experience with policy team outside of this case and my impression was that they're a different kind of people, at least while they're at work).

Don't know... if it bothers you, stay calm but keep checking on the case. What I would do is I would tell the support that I would check in few days, and that if I still see it that I would contact them again, and do an infinite number of follow ups until I either:

- get an answer why something like that can run, or
- see it gone

They absolutely don't have to tell you anything about that account in order to confirm or deny a case. It's just their way of getting away, and obviously to hide anything that could open a hole for people that actually want to abuse the system.

[ChanandlerBong]

it's a sad fact that "abusers" who are paying good money to abuse the system aren't quite as despicable in the eyes of those policing the system as those who abuse it for free. Way of the world.

[beetricks]

I hear you sandyeggo. If you really want to pursue it you need to give them all the evidence - make it easy for them to understand what the problem is and how the advertiser is abusing the system. I hate to say it, but it may not be worth pursuing, unless you're fairly sure no other competitor will crop up and do the same thing. There are so many ways around the double-serving policy, which I agree is unfair. Sometimes I think an advertisers union could help push for response on widespread concerns - many complaints in a short space of time are more likely to get a response.

That said, if you present the evidence, and don't see the advertiser being taken down, that implies you too could employ this "technique." I'd be wary of doing it for fear of future quality score slapping though.