A warning for those who want to test sites with Adwords

Hey everyone- just a warning based on an experience that happened to me.

I created an adwords campaign, just a few dollars a day, for a site that I was working on. It did have only original content and a clear topic (auctions), but not very much content per page.

I only ran it for probably a week or two at the most, with very specific exact match searches so it wasn't yielding tons of impressions.

I stopped the ad and did not use it ever again. Several months later Google banned the account because they thought the car auction page was too "low quality" - even though the ad campaign had not been active for months, and the site was in the process of being built.

Wanted to let you all know in case you decide you want to run adwords ads to test a campaign on a developing site. This was also not a BS no content site with only ads on it.

 

Google really don't like affiliate marketing.
So if your site was aimed at just sending visitors to an affiliate offer then this would fit with that policy.
But I don't think they have a problem sending visitors from adsense to some relevant content - such as free information in exchange for an opt in?
I'd be interested to know sort of things you had on the site - affiliate offers, adsense or optins?

 

The site featured auctions from ebay for the products, which were organized by make/model with specs and content for each.. I don't think they have a problem with that if there is enough content and the ebay listings are an afterthought, but in the early stages, there was a pretty small amount of content for each item and the auctions featured.

That isn't necessarily news to anyone, but what was interesting was that they only ran for a minute as a test and were not actively running. I wanted to let people know to not even CREATE a campaign for a site until you are completely confident that the site would be considered quality by google and remove any affiliate type links.

 

good post.i have the same puzzle. perhaps you should convert your affiliate site into your own.

 

It might be possbile to avoid a QS slap/account ban by just taking down the test landing page entirely, or changing the links in your ads. If Google can't see your site, then they can't judge it.

 

yep if its being built better to hide it or change the landing page

 

I listened to a webinar from Ryan Deiss a couple of years ago.
His suggestion was to test 10 affiliate offers by driving Adwords traffic to each of them for 100 clicks.
His recommendation was not to do this for more than 24 hours because it's against Google's terms of service.
To get started finding an offer that converts, he said this was the quickest and cheapest thing to do - at the risk of upsetting Google.
Maybe more people have started trying this out - and Google are clamping down hard.
Useful to know they are now using a hammer to crack a walnut.

 

Same thing happened to my wife's account.
I guess I'll ask Google if I can use adwords for a particular site by showing it before establish any campaigns..

 

same thing here.

i was trying out a few campaigns playing with words and my account was banned.

it's the worst thing that ever happened to me online.

 

Hey guys, something similar just happened to me, I had an Ad get rejected for a mistake in the URL and my site was in beta, my account was briefly suspended, but now its back online. I just read a bunch of horror stories about people having their accounts banned on Google and losing their businesses. That sounds horrible! Be careful!!