Google Ban Email – Why’d You Get Banned?
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Google is...
So all the hooplah recently has to do with not just getting Google Slapped… but getting Google BANNED (a.k.a. chewed up, spat out, then stomped on…)
Ouch!
There’s still a fair amount of mystery and confusion surrounding the reasons why Google would not just slap you (which was confusing as it is) but why they’d flat out ban you. I mean, it just seems like if you are making money with AdWords (which means you are making Google money), they ban you… OMGWTFBBQ right?
One of my clients forwarded me the email he received from Google as to why he might have gotten banned and I figure this might be good to share with you (maybe it’ll help prevent you from getting banned). Check it out below.
As to those of you who HAVE gotten banned, I’d love to hear the reason why you think you got banned, please share in the comment section!
Here goes the email:
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Subject: Your Google AdWords account has been disabled
Reply-To: LPQ-Support@google.com
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.
As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks. If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.
Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling. These types of sites include, but are not limited to:
- Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
- Sites that charge for “free” software
- Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
- Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
- Sites that install malware software on a visitor’s computer
Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account. In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously 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 disabling.
You can review our Advertising Policies, including our Landing Page and Site Quality guidelines, by visiting: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
You may also review the complete AdWords Terms & Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
In addition, our FAQ about Account Disablings can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786
If you have additional questions or concerns not addressed by our policies or help center, you can contact support by replying to this email.
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords team
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Raymond Fong
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Don’t Let Your Past Dictate Your Future
By · CommentsI am reading Psycho Cybernetics (well, technically listening to the audio CD).
It’s pretty fascinating and I’d recommend you to give it a good read/listen.
One discussed topic that kept ranging in my head, and one which I want to share with you here, is the concept that too many of us live in our past. Too many of us beat ourselves up too much when we fail, and we let those past failures affect us too much for far too long.
A prime example has to do with professional athletes. What makes a great wide receiver on a NFL team, among other things, is his uncanny ability to forget about the perfect pass he just dropped. What makes a great golfer like Tiger Woods is his willingness to let go of the easy shot he just mucked up. I started this post...» And on and on and on…
What Makes Them so Special?
See, these top caliber athletes don’t let what happened in the past affect them, no matter whether what happened were a year ago or just mere seconds ago. They don’t dwell on the mistakes they made in the past, instead, they focus on their strengths and the opportunities in the near future for them to showcase those strengths.
They don’t think about what they do NOT want to be or do… instead, they focus on what they WANT to do and WANT to be.
You see, your mind can’t interpret any “do not wants”, it just interprets everything you envision as a “want”.
It’s sort of like this… you are riding a bike and you see an obstacle in your way that you want to avoid (so you don’t end up doing a face plant). Well, if you focus on the obstacle thinking “must avoid this, must avoid this”, it’s almost a sure-bet you are going to automatically drift towards the obstacle and run smack into it.
However, if you instead focus on the road ahead, on the path you DO WANT to follow (to naturally avoid the obstacle), you’ll naturally follow that path and avoid that obstacle!
This is your mind taking what you envision (and not able to discern your “do not want” but instead, treat everything you envision as “want”) and making it into a reality.
So if an athlete was to focus on his last dropped shot or missed shot and how he wishes to NOT do it again, you can bet that he will do it again and again. This is why top athletes have that uncanny ability to let go of the past mistakes and instead, focus on the future he wishes to create for himself (and his team).
What About You?
Are you leaving with some regrets in your life you have a difficult time letting go? +/-» Are you living in the past? Do you think to yourself, “I’ll never do THAT again?”
Stop.
Don’t think about the mistake you wish to never make; instead, focus on the mistake life you want to lead. Don’t think about the person you wish to never be; instead, focus on being the person you WANT to be.
To Ping or *NOT* to Ping
By · CommentsHey hey!
I know it’s been a long time since I last posted. As always, being a secret ninja warrior keeps me busy…well, that and I just finished my first triathlon
visited my folks up in Seattle
took Bubba (our SEO dog) out to chase seagulls on the beach for the first time
That's a seagull up top... and the tiny dot is Bubba desparately trying to catch up...
and of course… the re-launch of SEO Networker.
But, here I am taking a little breather just so I can talk to you 
Since I last wrote, there’s been an important change with the Google algorithm that I want to share with you concerning the “nofollow” tag. In case you’re unfamiliar with the “nofollow” tag, it is a HTML tag that you can embed in your html links to “No Follow” specific links… And yes, I just used the darn word in its own definition – fux pas I know! Let me explain.
NoFollow & PageRank
So you should know something about PageRank right? If you don’t (AND don’t know about the “nofollow” tag then by gawd, visit SEO Networker and opt in to get some free lessons on fundamentals of SEO.) In a nutshell (and this is oversimplifying it) Google “grades” your webpage on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the “best”.
Now, where “nofollow” links come in is that Google looks at your outbound links and determines that each outbound link on that page is sort of like you “lending” your PR to those pages you are linking to. The more pages you link out, the more of your PageRank you have to divide by so the less each link is “worth” in terms of SEO value.
So if you webpage A has 1,000 links one of which links to webpage B… To website B, that link isn’t worth as much as if webpage A only had two links. With me?
Well, folks use to be able to mold their outbound linking (i.e. they can decide whom to pass their PageRank/SEO juice to) by putting the “nofollow” tags on those links they DON’T care about.
For example, let’s say I want to link to SEO Networker and on the same page, link to CNN. Well, I don’t care about SEOing CNN but I do care about passing my PR to SEO Networker, so I’d nofollow CNN to make all of my PR go to SEO Networker.
Well, that USE to be the case.
Nofollow No More… Sort Of
Well just recently, for whatever reason, Google decided to disallow SEOists from playing this game. They changed the nofollow tag such that no matter if you nofollow a link or not, that link still counts against your overall PageRank/SEO juice passing of the webpage. That means in the example of linking to both SEO Networker and CNN, it doesn’t matter if I nofollow the link to CNN, the mere fact that I have a link to CNN on that page diminishes the PageRank I am passing off to SEO Networker.
However, because of the nofollow, CNN will NOT benefit from the linking. Bizarre huh?
There are a lot of implications to this change along with strategies people are advocating to get around this change including using iFrame and JavaScript… But I am not going to get into that. Instead, I want to talk to you about something very Wordpress specific, and that has to do with pingbacks.
To Pingback or Not?
Pingback is where if someone links to one of your posts or pages on your Wordpress site, it alerts you in your comment section that someone has referred to your post and linked to it. This helps encourage discussions etc. Well, here’s the catch, pingbacks sets a link back to the person who linked to your post/page.
As you can see in the example above, there’s a link that goes out to the site that linked to my post.
That didn’t use to be a problem because the comments are by default nofollowed. But now, with this silly change done by Google, you can see how each pingback results in diminished outbound linking power of your page. 
So what I did was turn off automatic pingback (by logging into your Wordpress backoffice, going to Settings -> Discussion, and uncheck “Allow link notification…”) and I approve and reject pingbacks manually. What I mean by that is I don’t reject all pingbacks. If I really like the website linking to me and think that it adds value, I leave it in. If that pingback adds social proof to me and my blog, I leave it in. If it’s someone I like/trust/do business with, whatever, I leave it in.
You get the point. Start being wary of how you are linking OUT from your webpages.
Hope that helped and please feel free to leave comments and ask questions
Raymond
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