Have any of you received a message like this ever from Google:
“It has come to our attention that despite multiple disapprovals, you have repeatedly submitted ads that violate our Editorial Guidelines and content policies.
Please consider this notice a final warning. If you submit these ads again or continue to run ads that violate our policies, we will be unable to run any of your AdWords ads in the future.”
I received this message after I recently uploaded a new campaign. Now this campaign was promoting a legitimate (big) company with a 100% legal service. Someone at Google got confused and by mistake took my ads as promoting something illegal. So ALL of my ads where dissapproved and I received the above scary message!
When I contact Google about this they basically gave me the middle finger in their reply. They basically said yeah you’re not promoting anything illegal BUT you have a bridge page so screw you anyways (I was actually testing the market with this page before I built out a full blown site).
So now I’m working with my affiliate managers to try to get my site whitelisted. My team is going to beef up our site with content and hopefully it will pass muster with Google.
Here’s the thing…
You need to tread softly with Google, they’ve been banning affiliate Adwords accounts left and right recently.
A good friend of mine lost a 6 figure income because Google shut his account down. Google claimed one of his sites had spyware – which was TOTALLY bogus. He was just promoting Clickbank ebooks.
He tried to work with Google to resolve the issue to no avail.
SCARY STUFF!
If Google doesn’t like your sites or what you’re promoting and shuts down your account down you’re screwed.
There’s NOTHING you can do.
Carefully read Google guidelines and try to stay in the straight in narrow as much as possible.
And make sure your landing page has substantial content or links to other pages on your site that have value added content. Google is cracking down on bridge pages like nobody elses business, and yes, I’ve heard of affiliates who have had their accounts shut down over having bridge pages.
HOLY SHIT
Right after I just got done writing about this I was checking my old blog post to see if any of them blog post was there. Well I notice the PR meter was reading on all my blog post. I was thinking wait a minute becuase our page rank has been gone sense it got penalized and I went to the home page and OUR PR is back.
LOL THAT IS COOL!
This is off the subject of the post, but I was wondering if you could recommend some PPC management software. There are so many options. What do you use?
I gave up on Google a long time ago. I don’t need a business partner who doesn’t communicate.
Brent,
How do you get your landing pages approved? I’d appreciate your reply.
Thanks
I have gotten this message before but I was bidding on some TM keywords but got around the filter. No biggie, really, just have to watch what you do. It sounds what you were doing was legit, though, so that sucks. Give them the middle finger next time.
Google has a three strikes and your out policy. So if you get this email twice from them then you better tread carefully as on the third one they are highly likely to shut your account down.
How a Series of Mistakes Hurt Shares of United
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/technology/15google.html
Google is a corrupt company that now does more harm than good
Most advertisers should allow pre-pop into their campaigns to overcome this. So that we can make real sites and put up forms to fillup on the landing pages with SSL etc.
Instead of using a bridge page or your own landing page, why don’t you just use the PPC campaign to send the visitor to the merchant’s own landing page?
I had the same question as James, why not link directly to the client site ? Does GOOGLE ban that approach ??? Though I agree it is good to have a landing page to pre sell/soft sell.