Account Suspended for Broken Links

A warning

[ember]

Just a heads up about broken links in your account. I've had the account for four years and only use it off and on. There are ads in it that are four years old and that lead to now non-existent websites and/or pages. They were all paused, but I never deleted them. The Adwords person said that is why the account was suspended (even though we never got a warning). She said to clean out the account, deleting everything not in use and we should be reinstated. I had no idea broken links in old, paused ads were such a big deal.

[tangor]

Could be a way on their part to get you active again. If you haven't missed it in four years, then...

But if you put items on pause and then forgot to do ordinary housekeeping...

Dunno. I don't have this particular problem, but it is interesting to know there is some account management on Google's part.

[piatkow]

They were much nicer to me - GBP100 credit to restart the account, only they had also decided that the site that had previously been fine no longer met the quality requirements so I couldn't restart any campaigns. I used the money to boost traffic on a different, non ecommerce, site - return from an ad dashed off in a couple of minutes was probably 10% of the value of the credit but that was GBP10 I wouldn't have had otherwise.

[ember]

Account was reinstated a few days ago. No explanation, just up and running again. Yah.

[brizad]

The odd thing about this scenario is that google also has had the policy of banning accounts for running ads for things that are now against their TOS (but were not when the ads originally ran.) Even if you deleted the campaigns they were not truly deleted (you can "undelete" campaigns) and you could still get banned.

Even further, if your ads linked to 3rd party pages (pages you don't own, control, or have a way to modify) years ago, they'd still ban you for it unless you modified the lander to meet their TOS. They couldn't seem to comprehend that someone would link to pages they couldn't modify. So again, "deleting" would do no good because they'd still consider the deleted campaigns as against their TOS and they'd shut down your adwords account and ban you for life.

So it's odd to hear that they're now telling you you could delete the offending campaigns and be OK. I hope that's a sign that google has started to use some logic in their decisions, but I'm not holding my breath ;-)