This morning I had an interesting email conversation with a subscriber of mine who just got banned from Adwords for promoting software that makes MFA (made for adsense) sites.
Yes, banned from Adwords, not adsense.
Here’s what happened:
He is a beginning affiliate. He just promotes other people’s stuff through adwords. Obviously not google’s favorite person, but not something they discourage either (there are hundreds of thousands of people like him).
He has promoted 4 products:
1. JP’s Niches In a Box
2. Brad Callens’ Niche Revolution
3. Mark Roth’s Affiliate Radar
4. Keyword Elite
He got a “content violation” warning for the first 3 campaigns.
In his words:
Sure, the first 2 just have a brief mention of ‘Adsense’ at the bottom. But not affiliate radar, that’s just a conversion tracker. I emailed Adwords explaining this, and they apologized and said they would route this to their technical team. So the killer came with KE, which they disapproved automatically after 24 hrs of me putting up the ad. Not suspecting anything wrong, I just made some slight amendments, and emailed them explaining why KE is not a ‘Adsense template generator’ but a ‘keyword research tool’.
6 hours after making the changes he got banned from adwords and was told that if he tries to sign up again they’ll know and shut him down.
He chatted with them 3 times, sent 2 different emails, and had 1 phone conversation where they said that their decision was final.
So here’s my question: Why is it that Google makes these blanket decisions and then has no process for repentance or explanation or forgiveness or anything of the sort.
What if they’re wrong with their decision? What if they made a mistake? Do they not know they’re playing with people’s lives?
I’m not saying that they don’t have to run their business, but can you imagine if my adwords account got banned and they said “our decision is final” and there’s no way for me to appeal or anything? That would sort of change my life!
This guy didn’t get any warning about it. He wasn’t even doing anything wrong either. Keyword Elite is a keyword tool. Yes, it also builds adsense pages, but it’s main purpose is as a keyword tool.
Also, why this guy?. If you do a google search for keyword elite you’ll see dozens of KE affiliates still promoting the product.
Why aren’t they being shut down.
Why will google not even look at someone’s explanation and consider it?
Remember when google used to be cool and hip and trendy? Back before they went public and they cared about people, not shareholders?
Back when they said “going public won’t change our company!”
To tell you the truth, google looks more like microsoft than like google.
Now, a disclaimer: I could have been told half the story. I don’t think I was, but it’s possible that I wasn’t told the whole truth and that this guy really did do something wrong. I don’t think so, but it’s possible.
[tags]adwords, google, banned from google[/tags]