

I'm in Adwords Hell - racerrick
http://tachophobia.com/detail.asp?c=298264

======
FreeRadical
Could it be because your Tortola travel guide site is itself dominated by
Google Ads? And it links to your other sites which themselves are dominated by
Google Ads?

For example the font size for ads on the site appears to be greater than the
font size of your content (in chrome).

~~~
dabent
It could be, but given the relative opacity of AdWords, it's hard to know for
sure. If Google just said what the problem was clearly and give him a chance
to fix it, he just might.

~~~
scott_s
Except his intent seems to be to put up the minimum amount of content allowed
and make money off of ads. For example, when poking around his site, I
confused ads with site navigation. His other ads are also not distinguished
from the rest of the site's content - seemingly to trick people into clicking
them.

~~~
dabent
Maybe that's what the problem was, but the refusal from Google is very vague.
He has no way to verify and correct problems.

It also gets more confusing when one can find so many sites that are far
worse, consistently getting top spots for apparently no reason.

~~~
scott_s
The refusal is vague because if they were specific, people would find ways to
follow the letter but the spirit of the regulations.

------
acangiano
I said it before, but it's worth repeating. The Achilles' heel of Google is
their customer care (or lack thereof).

~~~
devicenull
How could they feasibly provide this? They would need to provide for
essentially everyone that has a computer, and anything they did provide would
be filled with people asking things like "my mouse is broken, how do I fix
it?"

~~~
nfnaaron
There is an automated reason why this guy's having trouble. Google could
easily look up a text string they've stored, based on that reason, and tack it
on to the guy's account. Something more specific than the unhelpful low
quality message he's getting.

Anyone who uses spamassassin, look at the X-Spam-Status header in a message,
it could be that terse:

X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-100.7 required=3.0
tests=BAYES_20,HTML_MESSAGE,USER_IN_WHITELIST autolearn=ham version=3.002005

Which is much better than "too many points".

~~~
wmf
Google intentionally doesn't do this because it would help spammers game the
system better.

------
utnick
what is the business model on this guy's Tortola travel guide site?

It seems like he isn't selling anything. Is he paying .07$ for adwords clicks
hoping those people click on the ads on his site, he must have a crazy ctr to
get that to work out?

~~~
SwellJoe
There are some categories of ads that pay extremely high rates. Real estate
and rental properties in high demand areas are among those categories.

Basically, the guy builds spam sites devoted to categories that he has found
to provide high ad rates. He brings in as much qualified traffic as he can via
lower price keywords and SEO, and then bombards them with those high rate ads.
He is attempting to arbitrage the lack of knowledge the advertisers have of
what keywords people are searching for, and their ability to garner traffic.

It's not a particularly high paying business on the scale of one site...but he
builds many such sites, and then focus on the ones that pay. If you read up on
SEO forums and such, this is incredibly common. It's what people with very low
skills, a lot of free time, and a strong desire to "beat the system", do when
they want to have an "Internet business". They provide no, or negative value,
and make a few bucks a day per site.

If Google didn't have their very own version of this business (Google
Syndication is a network of similar spam sites operated by Google), he'd
probably get away with it. But, I guess Google doesn't want to share the
profits.

~~~
NathanKP
That is the best explanation of the system that I have heard yet. I'll just
add one thing. For many of such sites the content is scraped automatically
from other site's feeds.

In that case it is even more borderline illegal. I'm not sure if that is what
he did with his travel site, but if that is the case he has no business
complaining about being banned.

------
david
You have a bunch of web sites with the same poor-quality layout that are
dominated by ads, that's pretty much the definition of a spam ring, and I
don't see why it's so surprising that google would want to limit clickthroughs
to your sites.

I'd say the best way to improve you're score would be to get a good design
that looks legitimate, and content-focused, and try to vary the designs of
your other sites to look more like you are actually providing something other
than the same ad links people were looking at when they clicked through to
your site.

~~~
prawn
Just a quick note on the poor quality layout - I have an info resource site
that was put up with a mediocre design. One time, I upgraded the design, only
to have CTR cut in half. Left it for a week and switched back - CTR doubled
straight away. Might be one reason the layout is the way it is - intentionally
deceiving/confusing is often a different issue though.

~~~
david
I guess that's kind of the dilemma. On the one hand, you could totally re-do
these sites to be appealing and useful to their users, but if you're focus is
on getting ad revenue more than actually being useful to people, that's doing
the opposite of what you want. There's no reason for the owner to be dishonest
here either, even if he provides "decent content", it's easy to see that's not
why he made these websites.

But on the other hand, optimizing your design for clickthroughs is also a
pretty good way to get blacklisted, so the design that works best for making
money off of visitors, is also a long ways from being the best layout for
getting more visitors to your site.

------
josefresco
This is but a single voice among a sea of unhappy AdWords customers. I wish I
could say this is the first time I've heard of someone suddenly getting hosed
by both the AdWords 'system' and their customer support.

------
bumblebird
Give them a call. You can find the adwords support phone number on the web.
I've called before and actually got really good support from them.

email doesn't get you anywhere though.

~~~
racerrick
I could not find a phone number for them in my account. There are different
levels of Adwords with different levels of support.

~~~
bumblebird
1.866.2google for US, There's an ireland one I use also but I forget it atm.

------
chris100
What can you do? I don't know, post your problem on a blog to get Google's
attention? Maybe even cross-post into HN?

It has worked before (can't find a link right now).

------
racerrick
Good replies guys, thanks for the points.

Click farms for the sake of click farms are one thing... but it shouldn't
matter if you provide decent content.

~~~
anigbrowl
I hate to be rude, but...you don't do that. you really need to rethink the
balance between original and commercial content, not to mention your linking
and so on. you list 6 or 7 hotels, but only provide a link to one of them, for
example. Some really simple (and ethical) SEO would increase the value of your
site a lot more than your current policy of buying ads in order to show
(mostly) ads.

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truebosko
I have no sympathy for you after viewing your site. It's these kind of sites
that create higher click prices for legitimate retailers.

------
racerrick
I'm actually a little fearful that worse will happen to me (from Google) after
posting this on my blog and on HN.

~~~
zandorg
Coining the term 'Google mafia'?

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DenisM
Google just doesn't do "support" thing in general. It doesn't look like they
need to either - what can you do?

