Since september 2009 there has been a outrageous banning wave going on on Google Adwords accounts. Literally tens of thousands of people have found their account in the morning not showing any ads whatsoever anymore. Some of them got the dreaded mail from Adwords telling them it was done and over with. Their accounts were suspendend and they Google would not accept any anymore in the future. But there were also a lot of people who didn’t get any notify at all, and they had to find out that they had been suspended by either calling the Adwords department or mailing them.

Now, I’ve had my fair share of problems with Google too in the past and I have to watch every move that I take ther. Altough I have been advertising with them for more than 3 years and spending millions I have never been assigned a account manager. I think that’s too crazy for words, but luckily nowadays I have somebody with Google who I can talk to about my campaigns and he helps me out on a number of tasks.

Anyway, back to the banwave. So now that things have seriously tightened over at Adwords, how can you make sure you don’t get a ban and lose your business? Let me sum up the most important and obvious ones:

- Do not run any rebill offers. Many, of the advertisers that got hit ran rebill offers such as acai berry’s, colon cleansers, bizz ops, teethwhiteners etc. This is a NO-GO anymore for Google. I’ve heard of instant bans when you try to run those campaigns.
- Watch out for repeated trademark violations. This happened to somebody I know personally. He tried to get round trademark restrictions by being creative with them. Like removing spaces, typo’s and that kind of stuff. If they catch you doing that, game over buddy.
- Do not run similar offers on multiple accounts. A lot of us try to boost revenue by just copying their landingpage to another domain (maybe make minor changes), then copy their Adwords account onto a new account and let it run to gain more revenue. This might have worked in the past, but Google is coming down on those. Have heard multiple stories of people who had their account suspended because of this
- Do not run Google money tree or similar programs. Google has banned every single account that promoted Google money tree or any other affiliate oofer that mispresented affiliation with Google, even if it was way in the past. Stay away from these!
- Watch out for poor campaign performance. Google always wants the highest quality search results for their users, if your account(s) consists of mainly campaigns with poor campaign performance or low quality scores, they will suspend you.
- Avoid reviewsites. Altough this hasn’t been proven, it seems that a lot of bans had to do with people running mainly reviewsites. Google doesn’t seem to like these too much and will protect itself with giving you a ban. What is proven is that reviewsites get slapped a lot and people tend to just copy them to another domain and try again. Do this too many times and it’s banning time baby!

These are the things I heard and read about that are probably the causes for the massive banwave. But besides these major points there are also other violations that may result in an instant ban such as:

- Iframing websites
- Redirecting websites
- Voucher fraude
- Illegal adult content
- Ripping competitors pages
- Outpricing competitors
- Malware or virusses on your websites
- Poor content on your website
- Link farming

So, you really going to have to watch yourself not to get banned for whatever reason. What I tend to do nowadays is to let an Adwords specialist check my page and campaign and get the thumbs up from them before I start running it. I chose to do this with Live Adwords Support. This way you can have the chat sent to you by mail so you will always have prove that you got an OK on your campaign.

You can also contact them by phone on 1.866.246.6453 or easier to remember 1.866.2GOOGLE.

Tags: adwords, adwords phonenumber, banning, google, live support, suspension
Posted in Google Adwords | 9 Comments »