John Jonas Blog

I’m writing this blog as a warning to everyone using Google Adwords.
The people who “run” adwords are Nazis with no feeling for human beings. If you make a mistake, there is no warning system and no appeals process.

3 weeks ago I set up a campaign promoting a page on my blog in Adwords.

When I wrote the ad it got flagged for a trademark violation (which is super common in Adwords) so I “requested an exception”.

The next day my account didn’t have any impressions in it.

I contacted google to see what was wrong with my account.

6 days later I heard back from them saying that my account was suspended.

Here’s the email I got back:

Hello John,

Thank you for your patience. I’ve consulted your account with our
specialist team and it has come to our attention that your Google AdWords
account does not comply with our terms of service and advertising
policies. You have repeatedly submitted ads that violated our copyright
policies in a related account. As a result, your account has been
suspended and your ads will no longer run on Google.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to
terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions,
please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Michael C.
The Google AdWords Team

Needless to say I was shocked.

At first I thought this must be a temporary suspension, I hadn’t done anything wrong. I mean…I hadn’t done anything to hurt Google. I hadn’t done anything that I knew of that violated any of their rules. I used their own process to “request” an exception. I didn’t demand anything. I didn’t do anything malicious. My account was in good standing.

In my mind, this must just be temporary…after all, I had been spending over $20,000/month on Adwords (which, obviously isn’t a lot of money to Google, but 2 days prior I had gotten an email saying “since you’re one of our top advertisers, we’re now offering you phone support.”).

I was wrong.

I contacted them through both live chat and phone (Google phone number: 1-866-2google) and was assured that the suspension wasn’t temporary and wasn’t an accident. It was permanent.

I was also told that the “specialist” team had made the decision and they assured me there was nothing they could do about it, and that there was nobody else I could talk to.

Apparently Google has some magical “specialist” team that doesn’t have to answer to customers, and acts as an excuse for the people who do answer to customers so they can just say “I’m sorry, I know this must be frustrating, but I can assure you there’s nothing anyone can do. The specialist team made this decision and their decisions are final….no, there’s no way you can speak to them….no, there’s no way you can contact them or make any explanations to them….no, there’s no way to appeal their decision, their decisions are final.”

So then of course I started flipping out. This is how I make a living, and I was just told that because I made a simple, honest mistake, I’m not allowed to ever show any ads on google again ever for any reason…forever…permanently.

A simple mistake for which I received no warning, and there is no way to appeal the process.

Murderers don’t get that kind of treatment.

Rapists don’t get treated like that.

(yes, yes, I understand that google is a business and they can do anything they want…blah, blah, blah. Whatever happened to “Don’t be evil”? I’ll tell you, It went out the door on August 19, 2004 just like wall street said it would.)

So, I started trying to contact someone. Surely there must be a way to contact the specialist team and explain to them that this was an honest mistake.

I wrote a very nice email explaining my situation and sent it to a few email addresses inside google that I thought might get some attention (one of them, btw, is matt@google.com. You might want to try it too…although it didn’t get me anywhere).

The email I got back was:

Hello John,

Thank you for your email. I understand your concern regarding the
suspension of your account. However, as mentioned in our previous email,
your Google AdWords account has been suspended due to multiple Copyright
disapprovals. 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. If you need
more information about our content policy guidelines, please visit
https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html.
…
…
standard google email garbage
…
…
We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising
available.

Sincerely,

Saman
The Google AdWords Team

I thought the “look forward to providing” part was funny.

I then tried to contact 2 different people inside of google directly through linkedin, both of whom declined the invitation to be introduced (not surprised).

At this point, I’ve given up on trying to get my account re-instated. They don’t care that I’m a human who made a mistake. They’re not going to repeal their decision (how could they possibly have been wrong in the first place…right?)

I don’t have an adwords account now. It has been a good 3 weeks of becoming more intimately accustomed to the way yahoo and msn do their ppc. They’ve made a LOT of improvements.

In the end, this will probably end up being a blessing to me. It’s an excuse to start everything from the beginning. New business. New address. New name. New credit card. New websites. New computer. New IP address.

Again, I’m writing this as a warning!. Please don’t rely solely on Google for your online advertising (fortunately I hadn’t…and I had other streams of income). If you do, you might make a mistake someday and find that you’ve been slammed to the floor and kicked while you are down, like I was.

Please feel free to blog about this and spread the word. More people need to know that they’re not allowed to “request an exception”.

This morning I had an interesting email conversation with a subscriber of mine who just got banned from Adwords for promoting software that makes MFA (made for adsense) sites.

Yes, banned from Adwords, not adsense.

Here’s what happened:

He is a beginning affiliate. He just promotes other people’s stuff through adwords. Obviously not google’s favorite person, but not something they discourage either (there are hundreds of thousands of people like him).

He has promoted 4 products:

1. JP’s Niches In a Box
2. Brad Callens’ Niche Revolution
3. Mark Roth’s Affiliate Radar
4. Keyword Elite

He got a “content violation” warning for the first 3 campaigns.

In his words:

Sure, the first 2 just have a brief mention of ‘Adsense’ at the bottom. But not affiliate radar, that’s just a conversion tracker. I emailed Adwords explaining this, and they apologized and said they would route this to their technical team. So the killer came with KE, which they disapproved automatically after 24 hrs of me putting up the ad. Not suspecting anything wrong, I just made some slight amendments, and emailed them explaining why KE is not a ‘Adsense template generator’ but a ‘keyword research tool’.

6 hours after making the changes he got banned from adwords and was told that if he tries to sign up again they’ll know and shut him down.

He chatted with them 3 times, sent 2 different emails, and had 1 phone conversation where they said that their decision was final.

So here’s my question: Why is it that Google makes these blanket decisions and then has no process for repentance or explanation or forgiveness or anything of the sort.
What if they’re wrong with their decision? What if they made a mistake? Do they not know they’re playing with people’s lives?

I’m not saying that they don’t have to run their business, but can you imagine if my adwords account got banned and they said “our decision is final” and there’s no way for me to appeal or anything? That would sort of change my life!

This guy didn’t get any warning about it. He wasn’t even doing anything wrong either. Keyword Elite is a keyword tool. Yes, it also builds adsense pages, but it’s main purpose is as a keyword tool.

Also, why this guy?. If you do a google search for keyword elite you’ll see dozens of KE affiliates still promoting the product.

Why aren’t they being shut down.

Why will google not even look at someone’s explanation and consider it?

Remember when google used to be cool and hip and trendy? Back before they went public and they cared about people, not shareholders?

Back when they said “going public won’t change our company!”

To tell you the truth, google looks more like microsoft than like google.

Now, a disclaimer: I could have been told half the story. I don’t think I was, but it’s possible that I wasn’t told the whole truth and that this guy really did do something wrong. I don’t think so, but it’s possible.

[tags]adwords, google, banned from google[/tags]

If you are selling stuff online, and it doesn’t involve a subscription product, you’re CRAZY not to use Google Checkout

Yesterday I got a phone call from my friend Lanny Morton because he was quoted in a story on the front page of the money section of the USA today (I know…he doesn’t really blog…I’ve been telling him he needs to for like a year now…). He had gotten a phone call from a reporter who said “What do you think about Google offering to process transactions for free through 2007?” to which he resonded “Uhhh…mmm…Are you f’ing kidding me?”. Lanny didn’t even know that Google was processing transactions for free…and he wrote an entry on the google checkout blog.

The reporter asked “Can I get a reaction from you?”. lol.

Apparently google didn’t make a very big announcement that they’re processing credit cards for free for people. Maybe google checkout isn’t taking off fast enough for them.

I think that in the future, there are a lot of merchant account companies who are really going to be hurting because of google checkout. If I can have google process my transactions so easily, why open up a merchant account. Google checkout is free…and right now it saves me 3%. I know…I could do this with paypal…but I’ve heard (and then had) bad experiences with paypal. Plus, there are a lot of people who don’t trust it. Most people trust google. Some people would die for google.

If they would process subscriptions correctly (without making the user click a link each month and go through the checkout process) I would use them for everything I do (which is mostly subscription products).

Since Yahoo sent out the email telling everyone how they’re upgrading search marketing accounts, I thought I’d look into it.

Holy cow do they have issues.

First, I was looking at their API. They have all the documentation for their searchmarketing api online, but it doesn’t work. It’s not active for people. There’s a list at the bottom of the main page about it that has “How so I sign up?” as one of the list items, but it’s not a link. It’s just a question. This is just where the problems begin.

Second, I had to dig around to find a phone number to contact anyone about it. I ended up finding the phone number to a company called kowabunga who was listed on their api faq page. I called them but they didn’t know anything about the API. All they could tell me was that the super fantastic yahoo ambassador program pays you $20 per account that you refer to yahoo search marketing. So, basically, this is an affiliate program that you have to pay $50 to join. That’s all they could tell me it was. I laughed at the chick and she laughed back because it’s sooooo dumb. Thanks…I’ll pass.

Third, I got a phone number to yahoo customer service from the chick at kowabunga so I called. When they answered they asked me for my search marketing account number. I told her that I just had a simple question about their API and she said “So, I still need your account number so I can record the call.”

Ridiculous.

So I gave it to her.

She then proceeded to put me on hold for every question I had and she would come back with a response of “I don’t have that information.” That’s basically all the information I could get out of her. We don’t know. I don’t know. They don’t know. Contact “them” and “they’ll” give you more information.

I finally said to her “They don’t give you much information, do they?” to which she didn’t say anything.

I hung up.

No wonder so many people use google adwords and google’s getting rich off it while yahoo just continues to struggle.

Google recently announced the release of their website optimizer, which I heard about from googleicious.

Now, this tool looks like it will be cool and all, but I don’t see how it fits their mission statement:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

How does this tool help them to organize and make information accessable and useful? I mean, I see how it helps them by knowing which sites are performing the best (may be incredibly useful as google releases a ppa program as well as their current ppc (adwords) program). But how does it help me, as a searcher? How does it help put better information in my hands? It certainly helps me find the best marketer and the best marketed information, but that’s not necessarily the best information and it doesn’t appear to make anything more accessible to me.

I felt the same way about google checkout, but then realized that google checkout will probably make it easier for people to sell information at some point so people will make more information available…ok, that fits their mission.

Searchviews touches on some of the problems that come with all the google tools. Interesting.

Thoughts?

Earlier today Chris emailed me a link to a Matt Cutts blog post with links to video seo answers that Matt did.

The answers themselves were normal.

“blah blah, blah blah, blah blah, nothing you haven’t heard before”

What really got me was when I was looking around the page I was on.

See, I have never gotten into the whole video thing online. If I want to watch video, I’ll use my tv with dvr. It just looks better.

Because of that, I had never been to video.google.com.

I’m not linking to it because of the ‘Top 100′ link on the page.

I clicked on it and I wish I hadn’t. Google’s top 100 videos are half porn!

With Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, I was surprised.

I mean, wouldn’t you think that with google not allowing adsense to go onto pages that are porn related they would do something about the porn showing up on their video site?

It gets even worse. On the homepage of video.google.com on the right side is a “Top 10″. In that top 10 are links to:

• Another Hot Chick - dancing for the camera
• Topless Car Wash
• Spring Break Mishap
• Paris Hilton’s New Music Video
• Girl Pwn

Are you kidding me?

I was out to lunch the other day with Jordy the other day and he asked me what I read about SEO that he could read too.

I told him that I normally don’t read anything, because there’s so much garbage out there that it’s a giant waste of time.

I still think reading most stuff is a waste of time, because the SEO industry is mostly a bunch of sheep who have never really had success doing SEO but they’ve read a bunch of garbage and they’re repeating it. What you end up reading is stuff that is outdated, wrong, partly wrong, blatantly wrong, or partially correct.

I do on occasion read ebooks about SEO. My experience with Ebooks is usually different than most people’s. My experience is that there are a ton of ebooks out there with really really really valuable information in them, but that in order to use that info to your advantage (or, in order to use it to make money) you have to have other knowledge already. Just reading one ebook isn’t going to get you there, but if you can combine some of that knowledge with some other knowledge of your own, you can really find some winning combinations.

So, back to my ebooks and SEO…

A few days before I met with Jordy I had bought an ebook about seo which I told him would probably be garbage and I’d probably return it and get my $80 back.

Well, it turns out that Aaron Walls SEO Book is one of the most informative pieces of information I’ve ever read about SEO.

Here’s why I think it’s so good:

In SEO, there are “white hat” methods and there are “black hat” methods. White hat is everything Google tells you to do. Black hat is everything Google tells you not to do.

Most of the SEO world refuses to talk about black hat stuff except to say that it’s morally wrong and the people who do it are evil.

Personally, I think there’s nothing wrong with black hat stuff. You can’t attach morals to a method of getting ranked highly in the search engines. Search engines are for profit companies.

SEO methods either work or they don’t. They’re not good or bad except that certain things might get you in trouble with a search engine. It’s no different than any business practice in which you take a risk of making huge profits or losing everything you have.

Aaron acknowledges this.

I was shocked.

He talks about how you can employ black hat methods, they just might end up getting your domain kicked out of the search engine indexes.

That’s why I think this book is so good.

Aaron actually has experience with the black hat methods and realizes that a bunch of them work. Because of this experience, he can put 2 and 2 together (white hat methods, black hat methods, search engine algorithms, other knowledge) and come up with some really good ideas.

It’s also obvious that he’s gotten a lot of his information from some of the engineers at google and yahoo, and not from other users posting stuff at places webmasterworld.com or other SEO forums.

That’s another reason I think it’s so good, Aaron doesn’t equate “search engine” with “google”. Most people out there don’t even acknowkledge that Yahoo or MSN exist except to laugh at them. What they don’t realize is that yahoo and msn traffic is often times more valuable than is google traffic. They also don’t realize that yahoo/msn get a LOT of searches.

So, for those of you wanting to learn SEO, here’s the book I’m currently reading.

I’ve learned over the past few years that the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole in SEO.

What I mean is that being #1 for all the related search terms is usually better than being #1 for the main keyword.

Take utah real estate for example.

You get much better traffic if you are #1 for “provo utah real estate”, “park city utah real estate”, “salt lake city utah real estate”, “midway utah real estate” than if you’re #1 for “Utah Real Estate”. Sure, being #1 for utah real estate is great, but people want specifics.

Look at Insurance.
Being #1 for “Insurance” is great, but being #1 for “car insurance”, “life insurance”, “health insurance”, “home owners insurance” is much better.

Or how about Business.
“Business” is great, but “home based business”, “mlm business”, “painters business” is better.

How do I know this?

ummm…well, you’ll just have to trust me.

This was in my referer logs today:

twiki.corp.yahoo.com/view/Overture/WhatTheWorldThinksOfYPN

You can’t connect to it of course, because its an internal yahoo page.

It looks like yahoo actually cares what other people think (unlike the other giant corporate search engine leader), and they’re keeping up on it. Maybe now they’ll actually do something about it.

Here’s to rooting.

GO YAHOO!!!
GO YPN!!!

I’ll admit, I’ve only slightly used adwords. All of my adwords campaigns are run and managed by someone else who has gotten pretty good at it.

However, someone else I know who is running multiple adwords campaigns emailed me yesterday with the following:

Google is messing with me again. Only one week after they finally got my content impressions going again (they said they had to review my ad again to be sure it was all OK, and it took them 3 weeks) [[Google had previously disabled his content impressions for like 3 weeks for no apparent reason]], they have suspended it, saying that something was wrong with the ad. They claim that it is gramatically incorrect to write “Solteros(as)” but they had just approved it a week earlier and you see things written in Spanish like that all the time. So I changed the ad to what they recommended, just to get things going, but now it has been four more days and nothing has happened. So I am off-line currently with [[An affiliate program]], after making $30 to $40 per day profit for over a week.

I have even wondered if some Google employee notices that a certain ad is getting tons of impressions (almost a million per day) and plenty of clicks (4,000 per day) at a penny per click, and decides to disable it and steal it for himself, at least for a few weeks. Am I way out there, or is this conceivable? Why else would it be approved and then a week or so later suddently disapproved, without me making any changes to the ad? I have sent Google two e-mails asking why they have done this and trying nicely to explain my position, but all I have gotten back in reply were form responses that didn’t answer my questions, saying that my ad is in the queue and will be reviewed “in due time.” They are now officially slower than Yahoo in getting things approved and running.

(emphasis and bracket comments added)

You know it’s a bad day when someone finds it easier or faster to use yahoo search marketing than it is to use adwords.

Downhill, downhill, downhill…