Eric's Estimate

Google’s 2009 Mass Exodus

Posted on December 3, 2009 by Eric2 Comments

There’s a lot of buzz this morning about Google and their mass banning of thousands of Google Adwords accounts. Essentially, it looks like Google has “disabled” the accounts of anyone who has EVER run any questionable campaigns… even if it was years ago.

Here’s the deal. They send you this email:

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality.  As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future.  Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks.  If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling.  These types of sites include, but are not limited to:

* Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
* Sites that charge for “free” software
* Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
* Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
* Sites that install malware software on a visitor’s computer

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account.  In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously violated our advertising policies.  Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level disabling.

And that’s it. If you respond to them, they seem to ignore you (so far at least). You can still access your account (I logged in this morning to get a refund of prepayment) for old data etc. etc…. but you won’t get any impressions, and you won’t get any clicks.

If you open a new account, this will be disabled too. Lots of people have tried over the years to get around it, but it seems the big G is pretty strict when it comes to being unreasonable.

Was I a victim? Yes I was… and the only campaign that I can come up with that would have gotten me banned was run about 8 months ago for about 2 hours and had 35 clicks. Everything else I have ever run on G has been pages with privacy policies, about and contact pages, and have not been selling rebills or free trials.

But do I care? Only for one reason: Other traffic sources are going to get more expensive.

That’s what really sucks about this.  People who are running affiliate offers are going to run them anyways. So they are going to find new traffic sources. Traffic sources that I’ve been using for the past few months because A) they’re cheap and B) they’re not assholes.

This mass ban does have some good points to it though. I will be able to get through an internet marketing forum without seeing 10 people crying about being G slapped.