Warning to Adwords Users

[MaChew]

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Hi all,

I'm not a frequent poster here, more of a lurker. However, after a recent experience of mine I feel like I should post something about it. Apologies if I've posted this in the wrong section of the forum.

A little about me - I started in the affiliate business many years ago, but specialised in the USA market even though I'm UK based. In 2007/2008, I started with PPC in the UK market and had some great success. I've been using Adwords as my main traffic source, but recently, like many others I've had some recent issues with the infamous 'google slap'.

I first encountered the dreaded 'google slap' around mid 2009. I was not abusing any of their services, and was providing a great service to my site visitors. Feedback was awesome, customers were happy, and so was my bank balance. Business was great. One day, I logged into my Adwords account to find that the quality score had dropped from 10/10 on most of my keywords to 1/10. At first I appealed, called Google and was one of the lucky few to get re-approved. As you can imagine, this shook my cage somewhat, especially considering I'd left my full time job and went full time with this. Feeling lucky, I plodded on. Recently I was slapped again, similar situation, only I wasn't lucky enough to be re-approved.

After researching more, I found that affiliates all around the world were having similar issues. Of course, there were the genuine 'google slaps' for people who deserved it, by either linking directly to the offer form their Adwords Ad, or by abusing the system in some other way. But the genuine affiliates who work very hard to provide quality sites, were also getting slapped.

A contact of mine who wishes to be un-named, built a whole business around Adwords, he had over 100 staff and had spent volumes of money that most of us dream about with Google Adwords. He got banned, without as much as email to tell him so. People lost their jobs, and his business went to pot. When he contacted Google, they just kept replying with blanket responses... in the end, he gave up.

Personally I spent over £30,000 in the last 12 months on one campaign, only to have it cut off, with just an email to say it's banned at a domain level. I don't want to re-create the same campaign under a different domain because I don't want to risk a full ban.... but I gotta tell you... I'm nervous for my business. These are hard times, my family depend on this business and Adwords is making it harder and harder.

Seriously, where are Google going with this? My users were happy, which means that Google's users were happy as they found what they were looking for via the site I was advertising with Adwords. Yet, they still pull the plug on the traffic.

I've tried other traffic resources, Bing/Yahoo etc and to be honest have had some decent success, but the volumes just don't cut it when compared to Google. Then there is Facebook/social media, well that's just a whole different bull to tame.

Has anybody else had any similar experiences? Surely this can't be the start of the end for affiliates via Adwords? Google basically just don't like affiliates, even though they kinda own their own affiliate network with Google Adsense. Is this their attempt at blowing other respected affiliate networks out of the water to make room for Adsense? Who knows, but one thing's for sure, I want another search company to rival Google... and FAST.

[theDaveB]

I have just had a warning email off them but it's hard to tell what rule your suppose to be breaking as they supply a list of loads.

Been on adwords for about 12 months.

Dave

[jointaldc]

I've heard of similar problems on other forums as well, hopefully it doesn't get too bad, I'm sorry about your friend, that is bad that he lost his business because of that

[astounded]

Scary that so much can change in an instant. It's a shame that their customer support isn't better. Being left in the dark like that can't be fun.

[Cheapdvds]

yep also had the same problem and i know a few others have.

i read that if you have affiliate links on the page you will get slapped now , no matter what.

[Mike_M]

The presentation at the A4U Expo on 'Avoiding the Google Slap' was interesting, I've written a summary of the main points here if you missed it.

I've been a PPC affiliate using Adwords for 7 years now and I've had many sleepless nights over dealing with this company. If you're banned, that is it. Your appeal will probably fail, and that is the end of your affiliate business. In this sense, Google is ruthless and unfair in the extreme to the 'little guy'. Bing and Yahoo just can't compete with the volume.

2 months ago I rang my account manager, only to be told I don't have one anymore - regardless of the seven figure sum I've spent with them over the years. Apparently it's because my monthly spend dropped by a few grand as a result of the recession. It shows truly shocking customer service if you ask me.

I'm now trying to develop income streams which don't rely on G - it's the only safe back-up plan for my livelihood.

On the flip side, I'm reading 'The Google Story' to try to gain an insight into their mindset, and it has been very revealing so far. Brin and Page wanted to develop the best search engine in the world. If you type in 'blue widgets' they want to show the 'blue widget company'. They don't want the user to have to go through an affiliate site first, which may feature blue, red and green widgets. This provides a bad user experience.

Their whole ethos is anti-affiliate in my opinion, but they have to live with them (well the bigger ones at least) to keep their shareholders happy.

[MaChew]

The presentation at the A4U Expo on 'Avoiding the Google Slap' was interesting, I've written a summary of the main points here if you missed it.

I've been a PPC affiliate using Adwords for 7 years now and I've had many sleepless nights over dealing with this company. If you're banned, that is it. Your appeal will probably fail, and that is the end of your affiliate business. In this sense, Google is ruthless and unfair in the extreme to the 'little guy'. Bing and Yahoo just can't compete with the volume.

2 months ago I rang my account manager, only to be told I don't have one anymore - regardless of the seven figure sum I've spent with them over the years. Apparently it's because my monthly spend dropped by a few grand as a result of the recession. It shows truly shocking customer service if you ask me.

I'm now trying to develop income streams which don't rely on G - it's the only safe back-up plan for my livelihood.

On the flip side, I'm reading 'The Google Story' to try to gain an insight into their mindset, and it has been very revealing so far. Brin and Page wanted to develop the best search engine in the world. If you type in 'blue widgets' they want to show the 'blue widget company'. They don't want the user to have to go through an affiliate site first, which may feature blue, red and green widgets. This provides a bad user experience.

Their whole ethos is anti-affiliate in my opinion, but they have to live with them (well the bigger ones at least) to keep their shareholders happy.

Mike thanks for your reply. I am actually losing sleep over this myself. I'm very worried about receiving a ban after multiple so called 'violations'. Yoir post here has made me feel less alone. I too am building something that doesn't rely on Mr G. Fingers crossed.

Thanks for the link, and the tip reading 'The Google Story'. Is this it? The Google Story: Amazon.co.uk: David A. Vise: Books. Heh, I just went to download it to my kindle and it's not available for it. Doh!

[MaChew]

Mike, just to comment further on your widget example.... I would totally understand Google's standpoint on this. But, consider this: If I'm running a price comparison site and I'm bidding on the keyword 'cheapest blue widget', then it would be better for the user to display a page where they can find the 'cheapest blue widget'. But if the user searches for 'blue widget at argos', then I agree that the user should see the Argos website, because that is what they were looking for. Same goes if the user is searching for 'blue widget', they should be shown the 'blue widget company'. Hmmm. I wonder if you only bid on 'cheapest blue widget' and avoid bidding on 'blue widget' you will have better success?

lol, sorry for all the widget speak... thinking out loud I guess

[jonsp]

Mike, just to comment further on your widget example.... I would totally understand Google's standpoint on this. But, consider this: If I'm running a price comparison site and I'm bidding on the keyword 'cheapest blue widget', then it would be better for the user to display a page where they can find the 'cheapest blue widget'. But if the user searches for 'blue widget at argos', then I agree that the user should see the Argos website, because that is what they were looking for. Same goes if the user is searching for 'blue widget', they should be shown the 'blue widget company'. Hmmm. I wonder if you only bid on 'cheapest blue widget' and avoid bidding on 'blue widget' you will have better success?

In theory yes and you could certainly say that an affiliate price comp site does add value for the user rather than just aiming to make somebody a commission. That said there's a difference between a price comp site that just sticks somebody else's results on a page (easy content etc) vs a site that does their own comparision, provides useful search options and fleshes the whole thing out with useful content.

You'd probably still need to do something unique to stay on the right side

[MaChew]

In theory yes and you could certainly say that an affiliate price comp site does add value for the user rather than just aiming to make somebody a commission. That said there's a difference between a price comp site that just sticks somebody else's results on a page (easy content etc) vs a site that does their own comparision, provides useful search options and fleshes the whole thing out with useful content.

You'd probably still need to do something unique to stay on the right side

Jonsp - I couldn't agree more. I understand that it must be difficult for Google to filter through all of the crap out there... but when you get blocked from advertising a quality site with unique content, functionality and loads of history... well.. it feels like a hard kick in the balls to be frank

[aotagain]

If you look at the big price comparison sites doing PPC, loads of their pages just contain perhaps 1 or 2 prices for the product advertised in the Adwords advert and the rest of the page is utter crap - often totally unrelated products.

So can only conclude that site 'Quality' also has an invisible Adwords budget factor built in. That sounds cynical, but its the only explanation I can think of for allowing those sites to run Adwords to those vaguely relevant pages. Google must be aware of them.

One thing I do know is that if you don't have enough comparisons, Google may think your page is a bridge page.
It doesn't matter if there are only 2 stockists for the product in the world.
It appears that even if you block the redirect, the bot still follows them and if they only end up at a couple of retailers, you're in trouble.
Do that across 50 pages and you're on the way to a slap.

I have noticed that some of the bigger sites are putting say 3 prices for the relevant product at the top of the landing page and then a load more vaguely relevant products listed below. Perhaps that's a way of avoiding the automatic Adwords detector deciding that you don't have enough comparisons.

Make the page title, h1 tag etc. exact for the product, but include a lot of c..p underneath. Then the robot thinks its some sort of unique offering on the page. Which it is of course. Uniquely irrelevant and annoying to the user.

I've made it my business to complain in various ways as a normal net user about those sites.
I agree, the sooner Google gets some opposition the better.

At least they are doing quite well at messing up their own offering, what with defaulting the first search to world and having that 'instant' thing bouncing around like a demented wasp.

[jonsp]

Jonsp - I couldn't agree more. I understand that it must be difficult for Google to filter through all of the crap out there... but when you get blocked from advertising a quality site with unique content, functionality and loads of history... well.. it feels like a hard kick in the balls to be frank

For sure. Just personal opinion but Google wants to deal with real businesses rather than 1 man affiliates. If you've got a real business - shop/factory/warehouse etc - and you want some extra business then that's fine. Same if you've got a real business that happens to be an affiliate, eg gocompare.com etc.

What they don't want is a 1 man band who's whole business is based on buying say £100 of adwords traffic sending it to a simple site and turning that into £150. Two reasons for this
1/ They can't police everyone. Some people doing this are good and provide a useful service but some of them are scammers, the Acai scams would be one extreme example. Clearly if a guy gets scammed by an adwords ad he's going to blame Google for showing the ad in the first place. If Google loses user's trust their whole business model is destroyed so it's sometimes easier to blanket ban everyone than hire thousands of people to manually police every site.

2/ Money. Even a big time affiliate spending £1m a year doesn't matter to google. They certainly aren't going to lose sleep over banning an affiliate and taking away his business. The only way G can prosper long term is by keeping user trust - they aren't going to risk selling that trust for £1m a year, let alone £30k.

Having done well via "suspect" stuff on adwords in the past and under the heading of "if I knew then what I know now" there's probably 2 ways to go
1/ Sail as close to the wind as you can, try and keep 1 step ahead of 90% of other sites but be aware the "quality" bar is always raising so one day you will get banned but make as much as you can in the meantime. Plan for that
2/ Build a useful site that gets users from a range of sources and use adwords as just an *extra* traffic source. If you're getting 1000 UVs a day from natural search, social, links, offline marketing etc Google is going to realise you have a good site and will be more than happy to sell you an extra 500 UVs a day - doesn't matter that you're "an affiliate" because to Google you have a useful business that users like. The "wisdom of crowds" quote in the presentation Mike referenced is the key to everything Google does.

Ideally of course use the money from 1/ to do 2/ - but never base your business/lifestyle on adwords. Best not be in the middle ground between "I'm screwing adwords for short term gain" and "I've got a real business that buys some traffic from adwords but would still prosper without adwords" - be one or the other

[MaChew]

Nice reply Jonsp

Build long term. Attract crowds. Then use Adwords. If somebody from Google could tell me that's the way to go and I won't get banned for doing that, then that would be grand. However, at the risk of sounding negative... 'they wont'.

Tell you what, I'm going to run some experiments and will post my results on here. There is a site I've had since 2001, it's doing approx 30k uniques a week and I've not touched it's content for 3 years now. I'll clean it up a little, and use Adwords on it. I'll run a campaign on it for a few months and will post back here. My only worry is that my Adwords account is now 'marked'.

[Cheapdvds]

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords/thread?tid=5a04f1a746033841&hl=en

there has been a bug the last few days regarding quality score , just found the above

[jonsp]

Build long term. Attract crowds. Then use Adwords. If somebody from Google could tell me that's the way to go and I won't get banned for doing that, then that would be grand. However, at the risk of sounding negative... 'they wont'.

Probably not. The average adwords rep would need a script to tell you what day it is, if you asked for the time as well they'd need to "refer to the specialists"

T I'll run a campaign on it for a few months and will post back here. My only worry is that my Adwords account is now 'marked'.

Of course it is - from google's point of view it's much easier to collect data on the people that create sites rather than the sites themselves. You will need to give back a bit of the money you've made from adwords in the past for the right to operate a "legit" site but if you can buy traffic at a reasonable rate it could be money well spent