As I mentioned in the last post, my AdWords account has been “permanently suspended” for landing page and policy violations. Given that I haven’t actually advertised anything for over 6 months, I was surprised by this. Why would an inactive account be banned? I sent in the question to Google (via the AdWords contact form) and eventually got this reply back:
Thank you for your email. Your site ‘burnthefat.com’ has been flagged for Unacceptable Business Practices and was consequently disabled. Because this is considered as a serious violation, your Google AdWords account has been suspended. As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and that any newly created accounts may be subject to the same suspension.
What struck me about this is that they’re complaining about a site that I promoted (unsuccessfully) as an affiliate in the past. I don’t own burnthefat.com. It’s the site for Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, one of the most (and maybe only) legitimate weight-loss programs available on ClickBank. There are a lot of sketchy things for sale on ClickBank, but I don’t think this is one of them. That said, I wasn’t successful promoting it — weight loss is a very competitive market to break into.
I’m not sure what BurnTheFat.com has done to get itself flagged for “Unacceptable Business Practices”, but apparently I’m collateral damage now. Looking through my AdWords account, I can’t see anything wrong with the ads I placed, which were all similar to these:
- Burn The Fat
Most Powerful Fat Loss System
- Official Site
BurnTheFat.com - Burn The Fat
Feed The Muscle!
- Official Site
BurnTheFat.com
These ads are nothing special (no Cleos for me!) but I don’t think they’re deceitful. I was doing simple direct linking.
Later in the email they said this:
In a review of your account history, we found at least one submitted site that violated our Advertising Policies. Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level suspension.
Again, I’m surprised that burnthefat.com was the trigger and not some of the other ClickBank sites I’ve promoted. Very odd, I wonder what they did? A quick look through the Warrior Forum shows that I’m not the only one who’s had their AdWords account suspended.
After exchanging further emails with Google, it appears that there is no appealing this decision, and they also make it clear that opening a new account will just result in that account being banned as well. So it looks like I’m out of AdWords entirely at this point, which is a bummer. I always liked reporting on the AdWords side of things when talking about AdSense because they’re two sides of the same coin.
It seems draconian to me to be punished for being a past affiliate of a site. Google’s always had a love-hate relationship with affiliate marketing, and now it looks like they’re doing their best to discourage its use with AdWords, especially direct linking.
My recommendations:
- Get a new account: If you’ve promoted affiliate programs in the past, you might want to close your current AdWords account and get a new one in its place. That seems to be the only way to get rid of the historical aspects. Use a different credit card to be safe.
- Avoid affiliate marketing: Probably the safest thing you can do is only promote things you own and create. And make sure your sites are compliant with AdWords policies.
- Don’t direct link: If you must use affiliate marketing, don’t link directly to the vendor’s site. Create your own landing pages and make sure they are compliant.
- Avoid sketchy or controversial topics: Again, if you must use affiliate marketing, stay away from topics like “weight loss”, “gas from water”, etc.
Again, I’d be curious to hear from other advertisers who’ve run into the same issues. It’s too bad they don’t give you a warning first!
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