Matt Cutts a spokesman for Google has a daily video he posts up on YouTube under the Webmaster Central group. This week Matt answers a question for Feb Sontain in London. Feb’s question was…
Feb Sontain asks…
Where do you see Google in 5 years? If there was one thing you would or could dispense/destroy/enhance/create/change on the internet, what would it be and why?
Matt starts out the video about talking about the philosophy of Google with using words like “think of Google as an advocate for our users”, “that we are making the right long term decisions to make users happy. So we get their loyalty, then they come back to Google”.
Errr stop the train right there Matt! *Crash* *Bang*.
Here is what I mean I see it differently of where Google will be in 5 years. I do think they will still be the leading choice for a Search Engine for users, but I do not think they will be a leading choice for Pay Per Click. Google pays its bill with ads if they don’t get there ad program right it could be the downfall of Google.
Google’s Pay per Click program which is Google Adsense has one important and essential thing lacking. This program has many features that other big companies already excel in. The biggest fault in this program is it has absolutely no phone support numbers. You are left using email support which can be rather scary especially if the support email address can see upto and over 10k+ of emails daily. that is probably an extreme under estimation but you get the point. The response time is rather slow.
But why exactly would you need to phone into Google you might be thinking? Anytime you have a company that involves the exchanging of money then phone support is absolutely needed. So will Google be leading the way in PPC programs in 5 years?
In my honest opinion I don’t think they will. One example is how virtually anyone can use your Google Adsense account ID. This ID can be found by looking at the source of a webpage. Think of this we know Google does not like spam sites and will often go out of their way not to list them in their search engine, this includes using adsense on gambling websites which is not tolerated either.
So you could and it is a very real threat that your competitors could actually use your adsense ID for gambling websites and purposely get your legitimate websites removed and banned from the adsense program for breaking the Terms and Conditions. In the meantime you’re stuck emailing support to find out why in the world your account was banned.
Has this happened to me? No it has not but then again I am not a big proponent of ppc programs. It has advertently turned the whole net into one huge advert. It is all rather unprofessional and annoying trying to not click adverts when looking for information on a website that has ad words applied to almost every other word. So that is why you will never see adsense or adwords on this website. If I don’t like it you can bet other people don’t like it either.
A more relevant gripe was the owner of Digital Point Forum has a bad experience with Google Adsense program recently. Here is glimpse of what he had to say…I should note his account was restored but still you can see how important phone support could have helped him, and the whole ban could have been avoided, lost earnings can mean whether you are living out on the street next week especially if you made it your livelihood…
A 3rd Party CAN Get You Banned From AdSense
I’ve heard people claim they were banned from AdSense unfairly for this, that and whatever other reason though the years… and to be honest, I just chalked it up to them doing something they shouldn’t have been and just not admitting it.
Low and behold, it *can* happen to even larger publishers (I believe we were approaching over 1,000,000,000 [yes, billion] AdSense impressions over the years). Note: I can’t confirm the exact number because, well… my AdSense account was disabled.
We get advertising inquires daily and we even go so far as directing people to AdWords and explain to them how to use Site/Placement targeting if they wish to advertise on digitalpoint.com. It’s less money for us, but in the end it’s easier and less to manage. I would guess Google has gained at least 200 NEW AdWords advertisers because of this.
Even more ironic is we actually run the largest AdSense support site to help publishers. Google’s own AdSense support site has 75,783 discussions vs. 760,145 for our AdSense help forum. We’ve even had Google AdSense representatives posting in our forum.
The Warnings
In the last month, we received 30 warnings for running AdSense ads on non-compliant websites (gambling related). These are sites that I don’t own, have no affiliation with, nor do I know who the owner is. I have no idea why someone would want to use my AdSense publisher ID on their site, but I guess that’s beside the point really. AdSense allows you to set a whitelist of your sites just so this doesn’t cause problems. We have used this whitelist for a long time (since we first heard about it), and none of these gambling related sites were on our whitelist.
Hell, I even got an email from Google *because* I use a whitelist (and STILL didn’t turn off the whitelist function)…
Quote Originally Posted by Google AdSense
Your Allowed Sites settings blocked $220 in earnings last week
We noticed that you’ve been receiving ad activity on sites which aren’t included in your Allowed Sites list. If a URL displaying your AdSense ad code is not on your Allowed Sites list, ads will still be displayed, but you won’t receive any earnings for that URL.
For your reference, sites that display your ad code, but aren’t included in your Allowed Sites list generated roughly $220 from May 2 through May 8.
My Response
After seeing a zillion of these notices coming in, I responded and let them know that these are not my sites and that I use their whitelisting feature (and that none of these sites are on my whitelist).
Sarah H. from Google’s AdSense Team responded back a couple weeks later letting me know that, “If that site or URL is not in the Allowed Sites List within your account, no further action is needed and this issue won’t negatively affect your account in any way.”. Alright… no further action is needed.
Account Disabled
Fast forward a couple days and I get this email from Google letting me know my account is now disabled because of violations of program policies… specifically, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on sites with content related to gambling or casinos. I *still* don’t own a gambling/casino related site (nor have I ever), so I’m assuming it’s related to the 30 warnings I got in the last month for someone else trying to run my publisher ID on their sites.
While I still think the majority of people who claimed to have their AdSense account unfairly terminated are probably just whiners that got caught doing something they shouldn’t be, I can say for 100% certainty now that it can (and clearly does) happen sometimes.
I guess it’s time to finally start managing advertising in-house… Just one more thing to add to the “to-do” list. /sigh say..
Use caution when using Google Adsense it is far from perfect. Notice the response time of Google, he sent out an email response and Google got back to him within two weeks. Two weeks! That is unacceptable in my eyes.
With that this is Scot Manaher signing off.
See you on Monday and don’t forget to check out our last article about learning about web development is a must. That is where you can shorten that learning curve by watching PHP Video Tutorials.
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