public domain

Huh? How are Google's SERPs a public domain? Google handled this badly. I think it is inexcusable that a long-time advertiser could become such a pariah overnight that they don't deserve an person-to-person evaluation or some form of appeal process. However, its still Google's search engine and, until the government says otherwise, they can do what they want with it.

Ok, if you didn't do anything to violate any of the terms than this *really* sucks and you are undeserving of a ban. There might be hope to get it fixed as I talked to someone who was randomly banned that got it reversed. But I still contend that if you didn't violate any of their terms or use poor quality sites etc. then it was a mistake on Google's part, reversible or not, and not part of a plan to kill small businesses (there are many who thrive). I don't think it was a case of 20 clicks not being enough for Google, I don't see how that would be taken in to consideration when banning someone as some high volume accounts get banned too. It was either a problem with the account, the site, the business model or a complete mistake.

In my experience, g is a villain - I expect no less than senseless account banning and slash and burn account management on their part. They have taken stolen 1000's from me in so called budget errors. I requested they return the money, and gotten the old "cut and paste" response as to why they would not.

I did not jump on the "class action g lawsuit" correlating to this crime, as I have an account with them and would not want to compromise it for 5k.

But Stu, you could possibly be right, but then you have to wonder what kind of company agreed to have "don't be evil" as a corporate slogan on profit making.

You have to wonder why EVIL was even a thought...I do.
Maybe I just expect companies to be GOOD, like most of us.

>>but then you have to wonder what kind of company agreed to have "don't be evil" as a corporate slogan on profit making

Well, that's a really simple answer - a company that has grown hugely in an age and industry dominated by the presence of Microsoft, and where they could see themselves competing with Microsoft - who, judging from all the EU fines etc were pretty 'evil'.

Stu

I sent you a sticky, I showed you where the missing advertisers were, and still there is doubt in your mind. Remember I had totally original content that I created myself, and the site was pre google. The fact that I could retain page one Adwords search position 5 in the US/CA for 3 cents and 1 cent global in the main keyword was too much for them to stomach while the other advertisers around me were paying 20 - 30 cents. Much less to say MS Office and Google docs are at the top of the page.

mmm.... what do you think happened?

Like someone said, how loud are you going to howl when your number is called?

The site is sold for it's organic and I am on to bigger and better things but the knife is still in my back.

ha,

I knew it, this is not a Featured Home Page Discussion. Where? It might have been for a short time but it's not now.

So much for free speech. Actually I expected this thread to get locked down a long time ago.

yes! Indirectly they control much of the Public Domain. What % of the web bends their knees to google to keep them up organic? What % of sites use adsense for revenue (and somehow those sites are so often on g's top surps)?
Not sure exactly but near 70% of the web experience overall for most users.

googles reach needs to be cut back. Im not a fan of gov intervention in much of anything, but something must change in terms of anti trust measurments.

I can't help but LOL at all this crying and bemoaning.

Anti-trust accusations gtfo.

They're a private company and they can DO WHATEVER THE F**K they want (legally speaking). Just like I can decide to display adverts on my sites of whoever I want.

If you don't like it, use another advertising medium.

Those of you who act like the sky is falling just because your adwords account is banned are just not trying hard enough.

This is coming from a guy who was making 5 figs a day from adwords alone and just had his account banned.

Instead of crying like a little biznatch I am excited at the opportunity to start afresh and target new advertising mediums - like media buys.

And if you really want to get back into adwords - it ain't THAT hard ;}

I've no time for 'consiracy theories' - it's simply about how they treat their customers for me. Yes, G can do what they like, Yes, G can kick off sites they consider poor quality, but it's the way they do it (lifetime ban with little or no notice for clients they've been happy to take $1000's from over many years) and lack of transparency (tell us exactly what we need to do to make our sites acceptable although when they slap an unrevocable life ban on you, there's no point).

@stu, @ron_mexico, @flanker - hear, hear.

Google have done the right thing in this case IMO - it's just the way they went about it with tone in their emails etc which is highly questionable.

@Khensu - if you spent less time on the paranoia and more time on working with Google's changes then you'd see the benefit...

We had our adwords account terminated today. This after spending neraly £100k in advertising since 2005 and spending the last 4 months trying to work with the adwords team in Ireland.
On the 18/7/09 I contacted google adwords about our account. Our ads had stopped serving due to low landing page quality score. I spoke to one of the representatives at length in an effort to try to understand the policy so that we could overhaul our websites so that they complied with google adwords advertising policies.
On the 20/7/09 our websites were manually reviewed and I received the following communication.
"I have received an update from the specialists who have now confirmed that
they have re-reviewed your website. Our specialists have found that you
site now complies with our landing page quality guidelines. You should see
improvements to your Quality Score soon, reflected by higher Quality Score
details for your keywords."
On 17/9/09 our adwords account stopped serving ads again for the same low landing page quality score issue. I contacted google adwords again and spoke to a representative . He again refered it to the specialist team for manual inspection and I received the following response
"Thank you for your phone call. Our technical team have reviewed your site
and have sorted out the issue with quality score. Unfortunately, this
appears to have been a system error, as there was no further information
on what specifically went wrong. Once sites have been reviewed manually
once, they should retain their higher quality scores. We apologise for our
system error, and thank you for your patience and understanding on this
issue."
On the 25/9 we received an automated email about repeated site quality violations with a threat that our account would be closed down. I again called google adwords and spoke to a representative . He assured me that the email had been sent in error and that as our account had been manually approved there was no chance that it would be closed.
On the 27/9 I received a second automated email about repeated site quality violations. I again contacted google adwords and asked whether this was another system error and whether we needed to take action to revise our websites again. I received the following response;

"From looking into this further it appears to be a system error.
I have looked into your account #*$!-#*$!-#*$!x it appears to be in order.
If you have any further concerns please contact us and we can investigate it further.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords UK and Ireland team
--
Was this response helpful?"

I was advised to make no further changes to the account. I adhered to this request. Since our account has been manually approved I have made no changes to website content or adwords ads.
As you can see from the threads and our communications with the adwords team we have done everything we could to comply with the regulations. In addition to that we have been assured several times by 3 different adwords representatives that our account is fine as it has been manually reviewed. We have also been told that the warnings we have received have been due to system errors.

We did contact the adwords support team again this morning who confirmed that our account had been terminated for repeated LPQ violations. He said that it would be refered to the policy team but there was nothing else he could do.
When I requested making a formal complaint he said that there was nobody to complain to.

The bottom line is that even if you think the problem is sorted with google adwords it may not be. If adwords support tell you that your account is OK and will not be terminated - dont belive them.

This will have a huge impact on my business, but no greater than when google serps removed all of our websites from its engine overnight in 2005.

Time to move on

Wilking77,

We are in the same situation also. We received warning in september. Then I contacted them, they explain what should be fixed. We fixed and they confirmed that everything is okay.

No emails since then and boom, just yesterday we received: "Your Google AdWords account has been disabled" ...

After 6 years and spent few millions they just close it. We have some affiliate sites which have good page rank. But also we have a lot of websites which are not affiliate and reflect various parts and departments of our company with PR4 and PR5 at least and quality score 10/10 9/10 8/10 and they are majority.

No transparency.

After reading all these scary posts, today I deleted all my low QS campaigns. Who knows what is a Low QS violation and what is not ?.. Sh**ty communication and customer service from Google..

Looks like Google is sending out the second waves of bans. My account is also disabled since yesterday. SuperF also received the ban as you can read here: [webmasterworld.com...]

ha,

I knew it, this is not a Featured Home Page Discussion. Where? It might have been for a short time but it's not now.

So much for free speech. Actually I expected this thread to get locked down a long time ago.

Uh, they continuously spotlight new posts on an almost daily basis. This thread was first added to the homepage at the end of September.. It is simply now off the homepage and on page two....chill out.

We apologise for our system error, and thank you for your patience

there was nobody to complain to

Welcome to the new world order!

One might think that any customer who is worth almost 100,000 UK Pounds would be/should be treated seriously. But not with Google and their systems and algos that are so intransparent that even Google staff do not know anything about it.

Indeed, it's time to move on.

(This thread is a type example for what happens if a single company holds way too much power in their market; that's why it is so interesting to read all this.)

I get yesterday for my birthday gift from Google : Final Warning Your Google AdWords account has multiple violations and also say me that I am at risk of being suspended due to multiple violations related to Landing Page and Site Quality. :(

I am super affiliate, spend almost 500k $, use only direct linking, and have score from 7/10 to 10/10 :(

And I am living from this and this is great gift from G for my birthday and my family.

And I am with big G from begining.

Ron_Mexico,

Seriously dude, no one cares if you do 5k a day or whatever. We all have (do) 5k-10k daily.

My goal is to make people aware of the anti-social behaviors of g and their overall slash and burn business practices.

Anti-trust suits are files against companies which are hurting markets. A companies controlling power over a market is usually a bad thing.

Bottom line is, they will get hit with an anti-trust suit - and they will be blocked from buying twitter, and for SEO purposes, "GOOGLE TWITTER PURCHASE BLOCKED" should pull this posting to a top spot within the next year ;)

Don't you just love G. I have an email dated 6th Nov warning me that my account is at risk of suspension for quality violations - HELLO, YOU GUYS ALREADY SUSPENDED ME WITHOUT ANY NOTICE A MONTH AGO! - they have seriously lost the plot haven't they?

Back in august I received disaproval emails for ads in an adgroups. 'Funny thing' about it was that I had deleted the campaign including the adgroup and the ads about a year ago. Other advertisers got the same email for deleted campaigns.

Makes you think how 'good' their algorithms are working.

Bad reality makes the best comedy.

What everyone needs to realize is that Google is a powerhouse for a reason. The reason is policies like this one. Yes sometimes innocent people get caught in the wake. I was one of them. I own a company that does Pay Per Click Advertising and Management. We have been around for over 8 years and have made Google millions through our work. Two days ago my account got hit with 3's and 4's for pay per click advertising and management keywords. A big shock since we have such high rankings on organics and high page rankings. I simply called Google, they reviewed it and bam, it was fixed in no time. Google will address your issue properly if you have a clear cut mixup.

The problem most people are coming into is that they have used practices that Google does not like and they finally got caught. These practices may not be "intentional" things they have done. This can be anything from lack of a privacy policy, email collection, anything affiliate, home based business, squeeze pages, lack of relevant content, low CTR, and any of hundreds of other things.

To Google a million dollars is nothing if the users start to go somewhere else because they are being exposed to useless or irrelevant content while searching on Google. For this reason Google is using a computer algorithm to weed out these listings. Understandably they are willing to boot 20% of good users if the other 80% they boot are bad. There are bound to be some casualties.

[edited by: eelixduppy at 12:33 pm (utc) on Nov. 11, 2009]

I simply called Google, they reviewed it and bam, it was fixed in no time. Google will address your issue properly if you have a clear cut mixup.

I guess you didn't read the posts here where people did that...but still got banned a week later and have been told to quit contacting Google.

How would you feel if after they "fixed it in no time" you suddenly got banned with no recourse?

It's easy to point at thin affiliates etc. as the only ones being banned but there are many more banned that have never touched affiliate stuff. Some have had the "Google blessing" that the "mix up" was fixed...and then got banned 2 weeks later.

Chman0024,

Are you tellng this forum, you were QS punked down to 3's and 4's - you then called g and they put you back up to 8-10?

A human simply "misjudged" the quality of your pages?

Can it be thins simple?

"It's easy to point at thin affiliates etc."

Yes this is true but the thing people are missing is that is only a small segment of what Google is banning for. I have clients that are banned because of links to sites that are linking to affiliates. It took us some searching to find these things out. We have now compiled an extensive list and created a process to counteract this.

"1Move"

QS is now determined on the fly so the computer misjudged us and slapped us. A human fixed the error.

If you really make Google money and have a completely positive contribution they will work with you. I'm sure there are exceptions but like I said there will be casualties and even if you get slapped there are ways around it.

I also get a ban from adword without an email notice, nothing, just an end of the road that fall from the sky near your face. They ban my account because I have tested about 100 clickbank product with direct linking. Some of them go down from QS 10 to 1 over night - I didn't know about it - no notice - nothing. When I contact them they say that I have a lot of QS 1 ads and this make a bad user experience. (the ads with QS 1 didn't show on search queries...) and... go away, don't contact us again. If they don't like affiliates how they expect to promote the 'google affiliate network' ? Why they put promotion on the 'google books service' it's not like an affiliate link in a content web page ? why they put promotion to buy the book from amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders. Isn't the adsense idea the same like a content page with affiliate link ? If ads with QS 1 didn't show on search how those ads make a bad user experience ?