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Matt, I think the main problem (having seen what it looks and feels like on the receiving end) is that Google's solution and treatment of the site owner is, for
by algoshift 15y ago
Matt, I think the main problem (having seen what it looks and feels like on the receiving end) is that Google's solution and treatment of the site owner is, for lack of a better term, rather violent.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who is not a scammer and is trying to do a good job. Perhaps someone how is learning the ropes. Getting hit with an unilateral, violent and --for all intents and purposes-- permanent action such as seems common in these cases can be devastating.
I'd like to relate a case that I witnessed that was truly perplexing. It involved about 200 domains that were registered with GoDaddy and placed in their "cash parking" program.
They were there for months with no issues whatsoever. One day, the domain owner realized that this cash parking service was Google AdSense with GoDaddy taking a bite of the minimal action. So...he moved all the domains to a product called "AdSense for Sites" (I don't remember the exact name). This services was marketed by Google as a place to park your domains and earn some money through advertising that Google would automagically place on these domains. Same service that had been on these domains for ages through GoDaddy.
The transfer went well and all domains were accepted. No problems. The domains go "live", if you will, and ads start showing as predicted.
Two days later the account is cancelled and the domains are taken off the program citing "suspicious activity". The irony is that the sites --and their content-- were handled entirely by Google through this "AdSense for Domains" product. No self-clicking activity took place whatsoever. No nefarious activity of any kind. This person was far too busy with real business to go around clicking on ads across 200 domains to make $0.25 at the end of the day.
This was simply a transfer to Google for the same service that Google had been providing through GoDaddy for many months, years in some cases.
There was no recourse. No way to speak to anyone. No way to even try to understand what this "suspicious activity" was all about. The account was banned, closed, done...forever.
Now, here's a person who had plans for legitimate and valuable real sites to be launched on some of these domains later on. The whole experience scared him to a point of simply rejecting the idea of doing anything with Google if he could avoid it.
We had no way to provide any kind of an argument to the contrary because of the violent and totalitarian nature of the cutoff. Who would want to do business under those conditions?
The fact of the matter is that AdWords/AdSense generated revenue could evaporate overnight and with no recourse whatsoever. That's a tough pill to swallow for anyone who is a legitimate entrepreneur looking to build value and make some money or earn a living through their efforts.
Scammers are a different matter. However, you seem to treat both groups with the same hammer which, in my humble opinion, is not right.
I now have to advise anyone we work with that any income that relies on Google for either lead generation or direct income (AdSense) has to be treated as though it could evaporate at any time and for any reason without any real opportunity given to restore it in a timely fashion. Without that caveat on the table I couldn't personally advise anyone to use your products.
In a normal business one would engage with ones vendors in order to resolve issues in mutually beneficial ways. In this case it is a one-way street with violent and severe consequences for your customers and partners. That's what you have to fix.
- Matt_Cutts 15y agoI take your points, and in my group we've worked hard in the last year to improve our transparency and our appeals process, e.g. see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/reconsideration-requests-get-more.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/reconside... from a few weeks ago. Likewise, AdWords now has phone support for all AdWords advertisers. I can't speak for the AdSense (for Domains) team other than to say that when they shut down an account, they think that they have good reason for it. And unfortunately, that's typically a situation where they can't give many details--if the team sees abuse, providing information about how the abuse was flagged would help spammers quite a bit. I know that Google can seem abrupt sometimes, and I dislike that, but part of the issue is also scale. See https://plus.google.com/117377434815709898403/posts/1hRWj489oEz https://plus.google.com/117377434815709898403/posts/1hRWj489... that notes that if each Google user had a single 10 minute issue every three years, that would need 20,000+ support people to handle that load. Or consider that there's 200M domain names, and all those webmasters want to talk to Google and ask questions. Even this link is discouraging: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/1/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8... It mentions that several thousand people get their Gmail account hijacked every day. Trying to support all the people who want to interact with Google in a scalable way is a really hard problem.
- relix 15y agoSupport for all Google users would obviously be painful. I think it would be fair if there was some personal support for people who either spend a lot of money on Adwords (I think there already is?) or make a lot of money on Adsense. These people probably have the highest levels of stress due to "insta-evaporation probability", and no doubt the amount of support people would be several magnitudes less if you used a threshold like that.
- Matt_Cutts 15y agoThere is phone support for everyone who uses AdWords now. I don't know the support situation for AdSense though.
- 15y ago