The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes and Bryan Todd’s book Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | IndieBoun
Today, I want to tell you a dirty little secret.
A few years ago, Google started slashing and burning Google accounts by the tens of thousands.
I myself had almost 10,000 customers who lost their businesses overnight because Google banned thousands of keywords and even entire Google accounts. That was only the first of a long series of purges, which mostly targeted affiliates and people in “edgy” businesses like alternative health and business opportunities.
Another customer of mine sold equipment that enabled you to add water injection to your car engine, which can increase fuel efficiency by 15 to 20 percent. Google banned his account because of all the problems they had with unscrupulous vendors selling mostly ebooks on the same topic.
What is this all about?
Certainly some of it is Google responding to customer complaints and seeking a quality search experience. But, there’s another ingredient: the long arm of the law.
In 2011, Google was fined $500 million by the U.S. Justice Department for selling ads to Canadian pharmacies that were illegally advertising cheap drugs to U.S. customers. In the government’s opinion, Google was culpable and responsible for the actions of its advertisers.
That, combined with other government crackdowns, has tallied up to more than a billion dollars in fines. In the U.S. government’s mind, why go after tens of thousands of rogue operators when you can put one bullet in the head of a behemoth? Uncle Sam punishes Google for the sins of its AdWords customers.
This is why Google seems passive-aggressive and bureaucratic. This is why you sometimes can’t seem to get a straight answer from Google about editorial guidelines — Google itself doesn’t know what’s going to get it in hot water. So all it can do is try…
