I am rarely one for conspiracy theories or donning tinfoil hats but a word of warning, a lot of this post is conjecture. With that disclaimer out of the way, I would like to discuss a trend that I have noticed with the paid side of Google AdWords. I wrote recently about Google flushing out affiliates that use AdWords. A lot of people didn’t agree with me yet Google published an update just days afterward to it’s “website types to avoid” document about the exact topic. A lot of commenters made the very valid point that Google owns and operates it’s very own affiliate network.

The biggest revelation that was drawn from this and the subsequent thread over on WebmasterWorld was that Google was flushing out even the “highest quality” affiliates. They were even flushing out direct linking affiliates that were advertising with the parent merchants consent. I wont go into the rights and wrongs of all this, it’s been done to death on the WMW thread already and I do not want to discuss the whole Google Vs Affiliates topic again either. What I do want to point out is what happened next….

Interesting theory, will keep an eye out on how it pans out.

As for my situation, my older accounts seem to be in order, as are other accounts in my MCC.. Will be keeping an eye on that too. While throwing my campaigns at anything but Google.

So now onto the good news!

Got one of these in my email today:

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality. As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future. Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

What ghastly things have I done to deserve this tragic fate? Well, the ONLY campaigns I EVER ran in that account were for 2 Amazon affiliate stores that I had written about earlier. One of those I had bought and know that the previous owner ran Adwords campaigns for (hey, I knew why he was getting rid of it and knew what I was buying, as I explained before) and the other is one that I made myself. I only ran the campaigns for a short time before they got ‘google slapped’, but I was going to turn them off anyway, as they were not profitable and I was doing better with organic traffic.

A google slap for a thin affiliate site I can understand. But a permanent ban from Google? Seems a little excessive. Again, there were never any other campaigns in that account, which I opened around the beginning of this year, but never used until August. I also have two other accounts, which do not appear to be banned and are connected by an MCC account, which includes client accounts (campaigns for local small businesses). Only the client campaigns are currently running in the MCC and I’ll have to keep an eye on whether they keep running. The only other campaign I’ve personally had running in those accounts was an old Clickbank campaign which I turned off about a month ago. Might see if I can reactivate that one. Another funny thing I noticed – a couple of campaigns that had been google slapped a year ago and got zero impressions on for months have been getting a trickle of impressions again after months of inactivity. I have no idea why. I think I’ll delete all those slapped campaigns anyhow, before I get these accounts banned also, if anything they’re the ones I would have expected to be hit for. I’m not sure I’d be able to create new campaigns in them anyway, will have to try. As you can tell, its not like I’ve been doing much with Adwords this whole year anyway, but this still complicates things for the future, if I cant run campaigns for local business clients.

One other reason for the ban hammer may have been that I didn’t have that account added to my MCC, which technically it should have been. Who knows. From the experience of others its useless trying to argue or even ask why the ban occured. Chasing it up will likely simply get my other accounts disabled, if their days aren’t numbered already.