This video about a merchant who ‘has a family to feed' and ‘will go bankrupt' getting wrongly banned on Google Adwords is so sad, it's funny!
Comments?
Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner
Last Updated by Rosalind Gardner 36 Comments
This video about a merchant who ‘has a family to feed' and ‘will go bankrupt' getting wrongly banned on Google Adwords is so sad, it's funny!
Comments?
I’m going to weigh in again here just to comment on Jim’s question about buying Ros’s Super Affiliate Handbook.
I have it and wish I had it long before. I will tell you in all honesty there is a product she recommends that I just purchased last week and yesterday I thought it might be an anomaly but today I can say officially that my organic traffic has doubled – yay!
I haven’t finished the book yet either so looking forward to more pleasant surprises 🙂
So yes – worth every nickle.
I’ll bite, Cyn,
What program was it?
Cheers,
Ros
In real life there is no funny about looking people become down. Especially if he has family to feed.
Google bans any site that has the main purpose of sending traffice to an affiliate page. OK, You are an affiliate marketer. So don’t you have to send traffic to a vendor. They will not consider your page unless you have your own checkout page. They claim anything else is misrepresentatiion of a product….I just don’t see the logic. As long as you are advertising for a vendor and not misrepresenting your intentions how is advertising for a vendor a bad thing. It is like saying all salesmen should be banned in the real world.
Also if the above is truely the way they want to do business then they should ban Google Ads. After all they are doing what they banned you for aren’t they?
Internet Marketer Ryan Diess discusses this “change” with Google on a video. -link is below.
He also claims that the profit Google makes from the top 10% spenders on Google significantly outweighs the profit from mom & pop Internet businesses and hence the motivation for Google to ban small businesses. Ryan states that Google has issued lifteime bans to 100,000 small businesses!
His theory is new technology goes thru 5 different phases and right now, Google is in the monopolization phase (kindly referred to as the “consolidation” phase) where the big companies are the only players who can afford Google advertising. He opines that it will ony become worse for the little guy. He then has a “solution” of $95.00 per month to tap into his training – and pool of expertise (yes a marketing message from a marketer). See link:
(affiliate link removed – please see comment policy)
What is interesting,is that Google has increased its marketing to the little guy. They have set up “coaching” (free services for the little guy) and have recently incrasesed their offer for FREE $100.00 of google advertising for trying Google ads out, up to $500.00 of free advertising. This calls into question Google’s real motive.
It almost appears that the big spenders have identified specific competitors that they want to eliminate and Google has complied by banning them. Any one who is good at gathering statistics may wish to do this as it seems with the right evidence there is good fodder for a lawsuit – and an opportunity to force some Changes.
America has been stripped of jobs, now Google is stripping Americans of the ability to earn a living as an entrepreneur. Let’s hope the American spirit prevails…….
Namaste
Hi Mary,
Good point about the offer of free Google Adwords credits… they were also sent to current advertisers who aren’t spending as much with them anymore.
I received one in the mail and didn’t use it. Call me crazy but I get plenty of great traffic nowadays from blogging, YouTube, Flickr — and most importantly my lists — without having to pay for advertising.
So, I don’t really see that Google is “stripping Americans (and others) of the ability to earn a living as an entrepreneur“. It’s just saving us all a wad of cash and making us smarter in finding other ways to generate traffic. 🙂
Cheers,
Ros
Cheerio to you Ros!
This is spot on unfortunately. I recently had a quality site with quality, unique content not banned but disabled. Do you know what they cited? Because my site had been scraped by a bunch of sites it was no longer unique and original! Yes, you read that right! I tried in vain to explain how my site was the original but they did not understand or care.
The saddest part of this is that the algorithm kicks out sites which get emailed to cheap labor whose only goal is to defend and substantiate the algorithm’s pick. The person you’re left with talking or emailing with has no understanding of how IM works or the internet for that matter.
Righ now, I have a $200.00 balance from promotional offers I will more than likely never be able to use. Thanks so much for that, Adwords!
Hey there,
I think I’ve been through all the above, Ive been banned from adsense, removed from adwords and all but de-listed at one time. I have been ‘reinstated’ for all but adsense.
In a odd way understand why they do what they do. Kind of like being a landlord of a big building and you let one tenant have a cat then the next thing you know you have a few tenants with cats.
Thats ok until some nimrod starts to collect cats and doesn’t neuter them. Then as a landlord you have to say NO to all cats just because of the one. Google has millions of tenants – imagine the smell!!
I had some of my content stolen and tracked it but nothing I could do. I too was penalized for duplicate content so I rewrote it and purchased copyscape (throw in your affiliate link here Ros) and have disabled the right click so it won’t be so easy. At least now I will have a weekly update to alert me to copiers and can have them contacted plus proof that the content is originally mine.
Hi Cynthia,
Love your analogy! It’s spot on. And thanks so much for sharing all that go wrong and the fact that we have the ability to make things right again…. besides you didn’t really want that Adsense account did you? 🙂
Cheers,
Ros
Been there. Google has become the big bully due a long overdue smack on the nose.
I was also banned from Adwords. And I signed up and started giving them money right back in the very early Adwords days.
What was my offence? I had very old adverts in my account that had been paused for years. Google decided it didn’t like two of the landing pages they were linked to and froze my account..!
After long discussions they said they would reconsider but only if I changed the landing pages. I was an affiliate for both sites, but Google were totally unable to comprehend that I had no power to change somebody elses site.
And the fact I those landing pages were actually approved back before I paused them – deemed irrelevant. The fact I hadn’t promoted those offers in years – deemed irrelevant.
Google is a total idiot sometimes. They completely lost all my respect from that incident.
Wow. Ok, so it’s not just me. Not long ago I got banned from Google AdWords because of 12 clicks I sent to a forex affiliate site 5.5 years earlier — and the support rep confirmed that the campaign had been deleted since then. Moreover, they didn’t even have the decency to alert me that my account was banned — my ads just stopped running, sans alert banner or email alert. I spent hours trying in earnest to restart my ads by reading Google’s Help pages and tutorials, but to no avail.
I calmly stated my case and explained myself in full. If they are going to be unreasonable and keep me banned, then I don’t want to do business with them. There are plenty of other places on the internet to advertise, both free and paid. At this point, if they want me back, reinstating my account isn’t good enough; they’d need to drop a generous 3-4 figure credit into my account to make up for the wasted time I had spent trying to resolve the issue, let alone their poor manners.
I posted a longer version of this as ‘EarlyAdopter’ on the thread linked above.
funny for sure but i also feel for anyone who was recently banned from google here and there without any reason, e.g. darren rowse’s youtube account, seems they are cleaning here and there.
problem is we rely too much on google
I got banned from Adwords about a year ago. They told me I had to clean up a website I didn’t even own anymore. So I deleted my ads. OH NO, you can’t do that, you need to make that site Google Approved before we will let you advertise again. So much for that idea! Can’t update a site when you can’t even get to the CPanel anymore. SOOO CRUEL – and so non-customer friendly, considering without affiliates, they would have no place to place sponsored ads. . .
Sad but true. Google is becoming like Big Government.
wow…
like you said funny and SAD at the same time…
This is pretty funny! I used to feel this way about AdWords too. The thing is that Google is so big they are like a big parent, providing nearly all the traffic in the world. I’ve noticed when people have a problem with google they tend to cry “unfair!” Google has a toll free number 866-2-Google and they have been very good about helping me and my clients with disapprovals and site problems. They aren’t helpful 100% of the time but have definitely improved.
I think they are so brutal about site violations because they are constantly being gamed by spammers. But they aren’t all bad. My site was banned from the organic results initially because I made the mistake of sending AdWords traffic to an affiliate link page; I cleaned up the site of all affiliate links and left it up just as an informational blog, sent a reconsideration request to Google and within 3 weeks it was back.
Hi Seth,
I totally agree with your assessment of the situation between Google and webmasters — particularly, affiliate marketers. I keep telling people to play by the rules, but for some reason it always ‘seems’ easier to try and game the system… until you lose your account or your rankings. And having to remove all your affiliate links kind of defeats the purpose of having an affiliate site… yikes. Sorry to hear you had to go through that.
Cheers,
Ros
In view of the comments I thought I’d let anyone who doesn’t already that Google is now being scrutinized by the FTC for anti-trust violations as of last week. Several post on the HuffingtonPost.com website. Not that I relish government intervention but sometimes it is good for business. Look what happened when Microsoft was sued by the FTC .
Couldn’t agree more with Ravi. Google is no favorite of mine and I would certainly characterize them as evil. Their engineering section still occasionally phone me in an effort to recruit programmers. But I was banned for life from ever running an Adwords campaign because of a mistake THEY made several years ago. Think I’m ever going to entertain a Google solicitation? Not likely. I have banned their recruiters for life and I encourage all programmers to do the same 🙂
Rosalind…
I could do an entire rant on the where “Do No Evil” go ..because I have been asking that same question for a long time … since 2007 when we no longer made a profit using AdWords, no matter how sophisticated the approach.
Hopefully that wasn’t a transcription of the real phone call, who knows though, it seems google policies have changed from day to day over the past few years!
I stopped relying on Google income about five years ago when my Adsense account was closed – they could never give me an explanation. I use adsense now on a few sites, since I was finally ‘reapproved’ last year, but certainly don’t depend on them for income directly anymore. Ranking high in their results is still important to me though! And – Google is still my search engine of choice.
Good luck online,
Tina
You should of thought about that when you sent 5 clicks to an affiliate offer 4 years ago!
Funny yes, but also so serious, it is not funny. I got my account banned recently for promoting Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle six years ago. I had not even run a single ad for a year, and had not run an ad for that particular product for six years! Do no evil my a__!
Funny and true. Google is so powerful they can treat us like garbage and get away with it. They definitely have different rules for different levels of players. I just got a warning on my Adsense account that I had to clean up some adult ads the crept into the classified ads site. While doing so I noticed that there are Google Adwords ads promoting the hardest most graphic P-0-R- N. This was not borderline stuff, no warning page, it went direct into the adult stuff. Earlier I had submitted my pets classified ad site and they sent me a warning letter that if I kept submitting such ads they would ban me for life. So Google can promote P(*&^% but I cannot promote puppies. Oh well……..I guess we are too far down the food chain.
I would agree and disagree, it is entertaining, but sad cuz it is scary how all a person is building can get destroyed with a click of a mouse it would seem.
I agree. I don’t find it funny. It is another example of abuse of power and yet another example of how the coroporate world is operating from greed.
Thank you Rosalind for exposing this injustice and abuse of power by Google. Publicity and exposure if the first step toward successfully demanding change.
LOL. This video is hilarious and so true. Google banned me because the affiliate website had poor landing page quality. And the ad never even ran once. Didn’t have a chance to send even 5 clicks.
Cee
LOL. This video was hilarious and so true. Google banned me for an ad that never even ran so I didn’t even get a chance to send 5 clicks. They said the landing page quality of the affiliate site was poor and I had to change it. They must think it’s really easy to get an affiliate site owner to change their website because an affiliate has been banned from google.
Cee
This is both hilarious and sad if it’s a real transcription of the actual phone call.
I suspect the CSR was fired or sent to re-education camp if a supervisor learned about this interaction.
I do believe Google should be way more upfront about how easy it is to get your account banned, and how you have no recourse if you are not the owner of the website they decide they don’t like.
To me, their policy is equivalent to putting a retailer out of business because one of the products they stock is faulty, without their knowledge. And until the manufacturer changes their ways (over which you have no control) you are out of business.
I have just finished my first reading of Rosalind’s excellent book “Make a Fortune Promoting other People’s Stuff Online”. Since I have this book, do I need Rosalind’s Super Affiliate Handbook also?
Thanks
That is funny! And it is so true that it is equally sad at the same time.
Years ago, one of my sites randomly disappeared from the Google search results. No spamming, no splog-marketing, no link-farming, not even pop-up ads on the site!
Just disappeared overnight. You couldn’t even get the listing even if you searched for the actual domain name itself. Totally banned from the big “G”.
Why? For no reason at all. No one ever offered any explanation. Could never get anyone to even respond. All I got was canned replies asking me to look at their policies and guidelines for webmasters.
Lost 90% of the revenue from that site. Had to get a new domain name, and move all the content and customers over to the new site, and never really recovered from that ordeal.
They’re getting what they deserve now though. Smarter companies like Facebook are beating them at the ad game. Good for FB!
I have gone from being one of Google’s biggest evangelists, to one of their biggest critics.
Can’t help but root against them, sorry. Slowly and surely, they *have* become evil, and their “don’t be evil” slogan is just one big joke 🙂
– Ravi Jayagopal
@ Ravi – I feel your pain. I had a similar thing happen with Google and it really sent me scrambling. It also took a long time for me to recover financially. I’ve never gotten over my distrust of Google, either.
I could not agree more that google is turning its back on the people that put them on top. I have left google and I will never return. They have out priced themselves and they deserve to have the same people that put them on top go after them and show them for what they are. This little comedy video says it all.
Bud L.