I'm in Adwords Hell | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Adwords Hell

tachophobia.com

31 pointsracerrick35 comments

Could it be because your Tortola travel guide site is itself dominated by Google Ads? And it links to your other sites which themselves are dominated by Google Ads?

For example the font size for ads on the site appears to be greater than the font size of your content (in chrome).

Yeah, it looks like an arbitrage play, which I know Google is constantly cracking down on (buying clicks in adwords and sending them to adsense farms).

Quality score is based on lots of things. http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=10...

I'd guess you are falling down on:

"# The quality of your landing page # Other relevance factors"

It could be, but given the relative opacity of AdWords, it's hard to know for sure. If Google just said what the problem was clearly and give him a chance to fix it, he just might.

Except his intent seems to be to put up the minimum amount of content allowed and make money off of ads. For example, when poking around his site, I confused ads with site navigation. His other ads are also not distinguished from the rest of the site's content - seemingly to trick people into clicking them.

Maybe that's what the problem was, but the refusal from Google is very vague. He has no way to verify and correct problems.

It also gets more confusing when one can find so many sites that are far worse, consistently getting top spots for apparently no reason.

The refusal is vague because if they were specific, people would find ways to follow the letter but the spirit of the regulations.

agreed. i know google is going around trying to make adsense spam blogs' lives more miserable.

this site isn't quite a spam blog, i don't think, but its borderline.

I said it before, but it's worth repeating. The Achilles' heel of Google is their customer care (or lack thereof).

How could they feasibly provide this? They would need to provide for essentially everyone that has a computer, and anything they did provide would be filled with people asking things like "my mouse is broken, how do I fix it?"

In addition to what Aaron said, I'm obviously not talking about providing technical support for people who don't know how to search for things in Google. But services where an exchange of money happens definitely require adequate customer care.

There is an automated reason why this guy's having trouble. Google could easily look up a text string they've stored, based on that reason, and tack it on to the guy's account. Something more specific than the unhelpful low quality message he's getting.

Anyone who uses spamassassin, look at the X-Spam-Status header in a message, it could be that terse:

X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-100.7 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_20,HTML_MESSAGE,USER_IN_WHITELIST autolearn=ham version=3.002005

Which is much better than "too many points".

Google intentionally doesn't do this because it would help spammers game the system better.

It would take alot of people but it would also increase revenues.

Adwords is not an intuitive service.

what is the business model on this guy's Tortola travel guide site?

It seems like he isn't selling anything. Is he paying .07$ for adwords clicks hoping those people click on the ads on his site, he must have a crazy ctr to get that to work out?

There are some categories of ads that pay extremely high rates. Real estate and rental properties in high demand areas are among those categories.

Basically, the guy builds spam sites devoted to categories that he has found to provide high ad rates. He brings in as much qualified traffic as he can via lower price keywords and SEO, and then bombards them with those high rate ads. He is attempting to arbitrage the lack of knowledge the advertisers have of what keywords people are searching for, and their ability to garner traffic.

It's not a particularly high paying business on the scale of one site...but he builds many such sites, and then focus on the ones that pay. If you read up on SEO forums and such, this is incredibly common. It's what people with very low skills, a lot of free time, and a strong desire to "beat the system", do when they want to have an "Internet business". They provide no, or negative value, and make a few bucks a day per site.

If Google didn't have their very own version of this business (Google Syndication is a network of similar spam sites operated by Google), he'd probably get away with it. But, I guess Google doesn't want to share the profits.

That is the best explanation of the system that I have heard yet. I'll just add one thing. For many of such sites the content is scraped automatically from other site's feeds.

In that case it is even more borderline illegal. I'm not sure if that is what he did with his travel site, but if that is the case he has no business complaining about being banned.

He does have links to reservation sites (e.g.: http://travel.ian.com). The adsense seems to be just for additional revenue.

Adsense provides an additional revenue stream for me.

Hotel bookings, ads for resorts and adsense.

It's actually a decent amount of money from a network of sites.

You realize that you're basically running a scam, right?

How is it a scam? If you're going to visit Tortola - there's basically no information about how to get there anywhere. I list the top places to stay, eat, and beaches. I list all of the ferry services between there and st thomas.

It's better than registering domains with names of big companies - now that's a scam.

You have a bunch of web sites with the same poor-quality layout that are dominated by ads, that's pretty much the definition of a spam ring, and I don't see why it's so surprising that google would want to limit clickthroughs to your sites.

I'd say the best way to improve you're score would be to get a good design that looks legitimate, and content-focused, and try to vary the designs of your other sites to look more like you are actually providing something other than the same ad links people were looking at when they clicked through to your site.

Just a quick note on the poor quality layout - I have an info resource site that was put up with a mediocre design. One time, I upgraded the design, only to have CTR cut in half. Left it for a week and switched back - CTR doubled straight away. Might be one reason the layout is the way it is - intentionally deceiving/confusing is often a different issue though.

I guess that's kind of the dilemma. On the one hand, you could totally re-do these sites to be appealing and useful to their users, but if you're focus is on getting ad revenue more than actually being useful to people, that's doing the opposite of what you want. There's no reason for the owner to be dishonest here either, even if he provides "decent content", it's easy to see that's not why he made these websites.

But on the other hand, optimizing your design for clickthroughs is also a pretty good way to get blacklisted, so the design that works best for making money off of visitors, is also a long ways from being the best layout for getting more visitors to your site.

This is but a single voice among a sea of unhappy AdWords customers. I wish I could say this is the first time I've heard of someone suddenly getting hosed by both the AdWords 'system' and their customer support.

Give them a call. You can find the adwords support phone number on the web. I've called before and actually got really good support from them.

email doesn't get you anywhere though.

I could not find a phone number for them in my account. There are different levels of Adwords with different levels of support.

1.866.2google for US, There's an ireland one I use also but I forget it atm.

Solid point. I'll look it up.

What can you do? I don't know, post your problem on a blog to get Google's attention? Maybe even cross-post into HN?

It has worked before (can't find a link right now).

Good replies guys, thanks for the points.

Click farms for the sake of click farms are one thing... but it shouldn't matter if you provide decent content.

I hate to be rude, but...you don't do that. you really need to rethink the balance between original and commercial content, not to mention your linking and so on. you list 6 or 7 hotels, but only provide a link to one of them, for example. Some really simple (and ethical) SEO would increase the value of your site a lot more than your current policy of buying ads in order to show (mostly) ads.

I have no sympathy for you after viewing your site. It's these kind of sites that create higher click prices for legitimate retailers.

I'm actually a little fearful that worse will happen to me (from Google) after posting this on my blog and on HN.

Coining the term 'Google mafia'?

Google just doesn't do "support" thing in general. It doesn't look like they need to either - what can you do?

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