27 Sep 2009 by Chris     4 Comments    Posted under: Gadgetry and IT

“Your AdWords Account Suspended Due To Repeated Site Quality Violations”

Google seems to have decided it doesn’t want the money from many people using AdWords to drive traffic to thin affiliate sites, which it’s already been penalising out of its organic results for several years. The move became clear on Friday 25 September 2009, as noted here, when AdWords advertisers were sent the following abrupt message:

Hello,

Your Google AdWords account has been suspended due to multiple submissions of poor quality landing pages. We are unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will not accept advertisements from you in the future.

Please note that our support team is unable to help you with this issue, and we ask that you do not contact them about this matter.

As I understand it, the result is that the account owners can still log into their accounts, but everything’s been stopped and there’s nothing which can be added.

Fortunately, I’ve never really tried this sort of stuff anything other than playfully, so it won’t affect me, but this must hurt a lot of people who aren’t exactly Google’s worst enemies. As a publisher, Google is quite within its rights to accept advertising from whoever it wishes, and in general, I’d applaud any publisher which is selective about who it’s prepared to do business with. However, I suspect that as is usual with Google, this latest move has probably been applied by some clumsy algorithm, also rejecting many advertisers whose material didn’t particularly detract from the user experience. Google has a track record of not being concerned about collateral damage from friendly fire.

In fact, on a number of occasions in the past, I’ve found that the AdWords > Affiliate Site > Vendor path has got me to the product I want to buy in two clicks, where the organic results were showing nothing and the vendor was nowhere to be seen in the AdWords column. Perhaps Google hopes the move will inspire the vendors to invest more in AdWords to make up for the loss of affiliate traffic, but I can’t believe many vendors have the resources in-house to put in the time and care identifying the opportunities which the affiliates do.

Some more reading, from the days before these messages went out, is here (by Dave Davis) and here (by Sugarrae).

4 Comments + Add Comment

• 
  Fabulous Photo Gifts 27 September 2009 at 3:47 pm

  Hi In Cherry Hinton.

  Used to hail from just outside Cambridge myself – remember my driving lessons round those roads well.

  With regards the adwords article above, I’ve noticed blips in normal organic page position the last couple of months (between page 1 and page 2) and whilst I can’t relate it to any specific changes, you can start to get paranoid about a correlation between timing blog posts to go live on Blogger and these page fluctuations.

  Crazy I know but how else do you explain page position hopping around when content is only being added to?

  Regards – Jonathan.

  my blog is at – http://purple13.blogspot.com
  P.S – I’m now in Derbyshire!
• 
  Shopping For Great Gifts 28 September 2009 at 5:52 am

  Yeah it seems like this email is being sent to many people across the Internet. When quality score first came out there wqas quite a buzz on the internet about it. Now this, “Your AdWords Account: Warning – Repeated Site Quality Violations” email has come out. The one thing I wish, as many people most likely do, is for them to tell people what they are doing wrong. Some people may need to get the suspension for deliberately going against Adwords policy but other people are using in an honest matter abiding by the rules and regulations.

  What I think Google should do is show examples of what sites can get this warning or suspension. People can only learn from being shown. Many people after getting the email are scared of losing their Adwords account. More information should be provided by Google so people can address the issues.
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