On the 18/7/09 I contacted google adwords about our account. Our ads had stopped serving due to low landing page quality score. I spoke to one of the representatives at length in an effort to try to understand the policy so that we could overhaul our websites so that they complied with google adwords advertising policies.

On the 20/7/09 our websites were manually reviewed and I received the following communication….

On 17/9/09 our adwords account stopped serving ads again for the same low landing page quality score issue. I contacted google adwords again and spoke to a representative . He again refered it to the specialist team for manual inspection and I received the following response…

On the 25/9 we received an automated email about repeated site quality violations with a threat that our account would be closed down. I again called google adwords and spoke to a representative . He assured me that the email had been sent in error and that as our account had been manually approved there was no chance that it would be closed.

On the 27/9 I received a second automated email about repeated site quality violations. I again contacted google adwords and asked whether this was another system error and whether we needed to take action to revise our websites again. I received the following response…

I was advised to make no further changes to the account. I adhered to this request. Since our account has been manually approved I have made no changes to website content or adwords ads.

As you can see from the threads and our communications with the adwords team we have done everything we could to comply with the regulations. In addition to that we have been assured several times by 3 different adwords representatives that our account is fine as it has been manually reviewed. We have also been told that the warnings we have received have been due to system errors.

We did contact the adwords support team again this morning who confirmed that our account had been terminated for repeated LPQ violations. He said that it would be refered to the policy team but there was nothing else he could do.
When I requested making a formal complaint he said that there was nobody to complain to.

The bottom line is that even if you think the problem is sorted with google adwords it may not be. If adwords support tell you that your account is OK and will not be terminated – dont belive them.

And they don’t look at how long you are using Adwords. If you are using Adwords for about 4 or 5 years you they use the same raw number as for someone that is using Adwords two months. They should look somehow at a percentage of warnings relative to amount of campaigns/adgroups and how long the account is running. Using raw nummbers is bad.

Amazing, that is almost exactly the same as how my experience (I also only use direct linking to the vendors website):

1. First I ever knew about this new policy was receiving a final warning.
2. Contacted support and asked how to prevent this in the future. Answer: follow the guidelines.
3. Removed each adgroup that had a remote chance of breaking landing page quidelines.
4. I also stopped creating new ads or adgroups so that I could not lose my account. Also checked on a daily basis all keywords and deleted each keyword with QS lower then 5.
5. One month later (yesterday) I see no activity in my account. Via online chat with support they told me my account was suspended.

And I thought after the e-mail I received and after having contact with support about this issue and after removing the campaigns/adgroups and not adding new ones my account was clean.

When Google sends a final warning they should check the whole account so you can remove all adgroups that Google does not like. Currently you get the first and final warning from Google and the warning does not tell which adgroups are affected (you have to guess). You take action and basicly one week later the algorithm can decide:

“Hey, about the first and final warning last week, great you took action and deleted the adgroups but today we de decided that we don’t like one other adgroup that was sort of aproved last week. So for this we will ban you for the rest of your life. And yeah we know, in the past week you did not make changes to you landing page, keywords or ads. Today it is still the same website as one the one we aproved last week but that is not our problem.”

So yes, there are indeed some problems with this new proces. Perhaps this will be better in the near future. But I think that is to late for people like SuperF and me.

Anyhow, they basically have a monopoly on search, so they make the rules and change them as they see fit, because there is nothing anyone can do about it. Anyone who is really in IM has been burned at least once if not several times.

But, they are not breaking any laws, just being unfair and talking out of both sides of their mouth, so unless someone wants to give them some competition, we are stuck playing in their minefield.