The Battle Rages On

UPDATE:  I have one big, happy damn smile on my face today.  I finally cracked that Google code . . . (Edward is the name on the account)

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 7:17 AM, AdWords Support <adwords-support@google.com> wrote:

Hello Edward,

Thank you for your reply Edward. Thank you for making changes to the site.
I would like to tell you Edward that your site http://xxxx-xxx.com is fine per our policies and you can resume advertising with us with this site.

Please let me know if you have any issues or concerns and I will help you further.

Have a great day Edward!

Sincerely,

Abhilasha
The Google AdWords Team

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It seems that many of the affiliate marketers I know that are teaching Adwords as a traffic source have left the building . . . abandoned ship . . . started looking for easier solutions.

Although I’m looking at other solutions too, I’m not off this ship yet.

Why?

1.  I’m still making money sending traffic with Adwords (Google search) to affiliate offers.

2.  The issues I’ve documented with one of my THREE Adwords accounts involve products that I am the merchant for – not an affiliate.  These sites involved squeeze pages – straight up squeeze pages.  Now that Google has flagged my account, they are not making life easy on me.  Traffic has stopped and so has the income from a very important part of one of my businesses.

3.  Although this is proving to be a tougher nut to crack than any in the past, I will crack it because I have to crack it.

I have now exchanged nearly a dozen emails with Google.  I fix my site, I resubmit it and they write me back with an issue.

It has been one hell of a frustrating process, especially when the last exchange involved Google stating my site was an arbitrage site.  By their definition an arbitrage site involves the page ABOVE THE FOLD as containing more than 50% ads.

Guess what?

There are NO ads on my site!  At least on this latest round they acknowledged there are no ads and that my site is, in fact, not an arbitrage site.

The bottom line is:

• We are getting closer to having some clarity about what is going to work going forward.
• I am clear this is not just an issue involving affiliates.
• And I am clear that once you get sucked into this vortex and forced to deal with an underwhelming support staff that you do not want to know what hell could hold for you – this is close enough for me.  I hate re-doing work that has been done.

Since I do what I teach it’s difficult to teach when the answers are alluding me too.  These Google issues are affecting me too and they’ve eaten a significant amount of time and energy.

However . . .

Faith is the only thing that drives progress forward.  And I have faith that there is a rich place on Google for anyone who can figure out what, exactly, it is that they want from us.

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