Google Bans 30,000 Adwords Advertisers

In December 2009 Google banned permanently with no rights to appeal (they might change the appeal process) more than 30,000 Adwords accounts (about 5.3% of all advertisers according to Adgooro Q4 2009 report)

Quote from Adgooro Q4 2009 report:

“Viewed in anything other than this light (my comments: reference to drop in number of Google ads per keyword), the timing of the December Google Ban would be considered highly suspect. On December 3, more than 30,000 advertisers (our estimate) were permanently suspended from the AdWords system. As this represents approximately 5.3% of active advertisers, it would be reasonable to expect a negative impact on search revenues. It is unlikely that Google’s management team would ermit such a wide scale ban to take place during a weak quarter, so this almost certainly signifies strong quarter over quarter growth”

It is believed the majority of these were probably affiliates and others who actually abused the Adwords system or created landing pages of no value and even of creating landing pages with malware on them.

When a banned account is appealed this is the stock response from Google

“Hello,

As mentioned in our previous email, your Google AdWords account has been
suspended due to multiple LPQ violations. We are unable to revoke your
account suspension, and we will not accept advertisements from you in the
future.

Please note that our support team is unable to help you with this issue,
and we ask that you do not contact them about this matter. If you need
more information about our content policy guidelines, please visit
https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to
terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions,
please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.

We appreciate your cooperation.”

The message here is very clear:

Google doesn’t care how much anybody spends with them they will unilaterally ban an account if it does not meet its terms and conditions. Any Adwords practitioner needs to urgently review their campaigns and take any corrective action necessary. In particular look out for following

1. Direct linking by affiliates to merchant pages… if you’re doing this then stop now before you’re caught. This has been deemed to be an OK thing to do for a long time. However times change and all systems become abused forcing Google to take action. Google have only one objective… to make sure searchers get a good experience when they click any type of search results paid or otherwise. Affiliates should create their own unique landing pages with good content and only then place affiliate links. It should also be made clear to the visitor what will happen when an affiliate link is clicked… in other words perhaps identify the link as an affiliate link. Privacy issues should also be addressed. My personal view is that if it is not easy to contact the site owner by normal means (telephone and email) then the landing page has to be suspect.
2. Creation of landing pages whose sole objective is collection of email addresses (called Squeeze pages) and especially those that require this information before any other information is provided
3. People using Google coupons for creating traffic purely for Adsense purposes and those who try to use Google coupons multiple times to get free traffic.
4. In short in creating an Adwords campaign don’t even think of doing anything sneaky and pay particular attention to landing pages and their relevancy to search queries. Single page websites are pro0bably in the firing line if not for banning then for low Quality Scores. Make sure any website for an Adwords campaign has content and is well SEO’d using basic rules and not spammy SEO.
5. Using Google Adwords purely as a keywords research tool… this is not the same as using their keyword tool. Essentially if you create an Adwords campaign for a short period then stop it, then create another and stop it and then create another and stop etc etc then it becomes obvious that the system is being used for keyword research. I have done this in the past myself (not in a big way) and will NEVER do it again.
6. In summary… if you think what you’re doing is suspect then it probably is as far as Google is concerned.

At the free seminar on January 27th  I will be discussing exactly what you have to do to set up a good and clean Adwords campaign. Sign up for free seminar today. Click here.