New Spate of Account Suspensions

Anyone else seeing this?

[JBrown]

We have 3 clients who were suspended since Friday.

All of those seem to be in error.

Is anyone else seeing suspensions?

[smallcompany]

When will we see a lawsuit like this in the US?

It takes an individual or a company that owned a suspended account that is ready to go for it after ensuring that they do have some ground for the case.
It could be a website that does provide enough of unique user experience and usefulness, or the fact that an account got suspended based on the ads that were active before the rules have been announced.

[ember]

I received an email about the second review (at least they are quick about this). It was very detailed and finally told me everything "wrong" with site. Granted, it is an older site and not updated everyday, so I was told to add user generated content to become compliant. And to remove links to other sites because that is a violation of their "bridge page" policy. This after 8 or so years of advertising with them. I basically need to redesign the entire site to meet their rules.

Ha! It is my site and I will design it as I see fit. I am tired of Google dictating the rules.

I've been using Bing since this happened, and while the volume is about half of Google, the cost is 50% less, so it evens out.

[DanAbbamont]

I hate to bump an old thread, but has anyone affected heard any more about this? I've seen people talking about getting terminated for old deleted campaigns in a few places and that makes no sense. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was some kind of mistake that happened while they implemented some stricter monitoring.

If you can get them to tell you what's wrong, I'd at least try to get something compliant up if you have the means. If it's some kind of affiliate site, then you've got to roll with it. If you're making the same profit on Bing why not try to double it by going back to Google as well?

[luke175]

I hate to bump an old thread, but has anyone affected heard any more about this? I've seen people talking about getting terminated for old deleted campaigns in a few places and that makes no sense. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was some kind of mistake that happened while they implemented some stricter monitoring.

They are banning over deleted ads, see my other post on the issue. [webmasterworld.com...]

They are saying that no error occurred and that's just the way it is now. [everstatus.com...]

Apparently, feel free to advertise garbage ring tone ads and acai berry diet crap that is all over Adwords still!

[LucidSW]

> I've seen people talking about getting terminated for old deleted campaigns

I've heard of this for some years now. Nothing new. And I do agree with them: a deleted campaign should not be subject to the rules because you can never reactivate it again (you can't un-delete). That's my biggest issue with Adwords even though it's never happened to me personally.

It should be a simple matter for them to ignore deleted stuff so I don't know why they don't.

> If you can get them to tell you what's wrong

They don't tell you much. I can understand it to some point: Adwords is self-serve and you're expected to read and abide by their rules. They simply don't have the resources to take every advertiser by the hand and explain what's there in black and white, that we sign off on as saying we read and understood when we signed up. That's their position. They provide the medium for you to advertise. The rest is basically up to you.

[iguru]

One of the real problems I'm seeing is that they have continually implemented requirements without much fanfare. Sure, we're all supposed to keep abreast of their changes but most of us do the right thing and keep our noses in our business. Now, we find that old campaigns - which they implemented for us - are out of compliance and must be fixed. The domains aren't even ours! It feels like a never ending spider web tying us after each move to correct the issues.

If you look very closely, G is making it difficult to advertise many affiliate type businesses and seems genuinely set on curtailing any industry that has an overlapping business with theirs.

Think about this- if you market for an company in the loans category by creating content that links to them, or, if you have a fledgling comparison site with only three resources, your site can be flagged and suspended. Conversely, if you have google adwords above, below and to the right of your content, you are fine. This is clearly abuse targeting any business that cuts into a vertical where G generates revenue.

[vphoner]

Affiliate marketing is a vital part of our economy and affiliate marketing promotes small businesses (thats how Amazon got to be bigger). Making it difficult for affiliate marketing to occur (blocking advertising) is hurting the economy and small business.

[ThatsBoBo]

Are a lot of you being banned affiliates?

It seems that Google is banning more and more affiliates from Adwords and focusing more energy on keeping those selling THEIR OWN products and services happy.

The whole affiliate thing always seemed like a big arbitrage opportunity to me anyway, and maybe Google sees it the same way?

[iguru]

The whole affiliate thing always seemed like a big arbitrage opportunity to me anyway, and maybe Google sees it the same way?

The irony is that we helped them become the giant they are by advertising for our own business, affiliates and any other legitimate enterprise where we could turn a profit. They gladly took the money and even helped us create ads for those sites. Now, those sites are cutting into their potential growth. It basically means that they have arrived and don't need our money any longer. There is going to be a class action suit from the looks of this and the timeline proves out this assertion in spades.

We helped them become this large and now they are pulling out the rug. With the amount of markets they compete in now, it will be hard to stop them. Couple this with the fact that they have the lion's share of search and we have the Microsoft of the 21st Century. But now, they have pictures of your house, they control your email, they know where you live. This is where it gets ugly.

[LucidSW]

> It seems that Google is banning more and more affiliates from Adwords and focusing more energy on keeping those selling THEIR OWN products and services happy.

No. They just want affiliates to do things in a certain way. It's all in the guidelines. There are plenty of affiliates out there who do and have no problems at all.

[iguru]

No. They just want affiliates to do things in a certain way. It's all in the guidelines. There are plenty of affiliates out there who do and have no problems at all.

YET! They are on a tear and the fallout will continue.

[luke175]

I was not advertising any affiliate links, all my own product but was banned for an old deleted campaign despite having an Adwords account for 11 years.

I've spoken to two people who had never used Adwords before, setup their first campaign for their own businesses (benign small businesses, not affiliates) and were PERMANENTLY suspended in less than 24 hours.

If you want to see a trail of wreckage, just go to the official forums:

[google.com...]

[google.com...]

[google.com...]

Google does not want to be bothered by small advertisers, so they just ban them for some amorphous reason.

[walkman]

Google will be begging you to go back there, they just need Amazon, Facebook and Bing (and maybe Apple) to provide some real competition.

[danielw]

I had an adwords account that I had not used for 18 months canceled last night.

[iguru]

The real question is: why now? What's coming in the near future?

[luke175]

The only conclusion I can come to is that they are at the point where they are generating the majority of their revenue from their top 1% and do not want to be bothered with the bottom 99% of advertisers.

With the threat of antitrust always looming, it gives them plausible deniability to claim that an account violated some imaginary terms before banning it.

There's no logical reason that an advertiser who (for example) creates one ad for his sunglasses store gets a permanent suspension in less than 24 hours.

Google is continuously integrating their own services in their results (mortgage comparison shopping for example) they simply don't need to be bothered with us peons that made them successful.

[iguru]

Well said Luke. You are correct. We put them there and now we are in the way.

I experienced this with a huge company that I represented for many years. At one point, when the web was really beginning to show promise, they announced at a huge conference of their top producers that they would begin competing directly with us shortly. They had a great plan and it even included allowing us to sell the same product for 1/3 of our current earnings. Nice move! So, I stood up and asked what percentage of their current earnings were represented by the folks in the room. The answer? nearly 90%. Next question was how they could stand in front of the folks who brought their business to its current level and stab them all simultaneously in the back? The room was silent. This is the same response we're receiving from the folks at Google.

Arbitrage and bridge pages produced by marketing wizards are what put G on the map. The fact is, they have no real content. It's all ours. They have incredible, undeniable, bad ass technology, but all of the content belongs to us. They have managed to collect, disseminate and manage it in near real time.

With this in mind, how is it they no longer need us? Something is brewing boys and girls and I don't like the smell of it.