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Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

hizook.com

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Re: Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

#101

Post by swombat »

lucifer wrote: post #71
shiranaihito wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager that he's offering to help not because Google is such a friendly and benevolent business entity, but because it's in the spirit of Hacker News (and ultimately, in Google's best interest to do so). The credibility of Don't Be Evil is taking a lot of hits these days. Some of us were never really convinced.

I fail to see how this is "evil". The evil one worries about in context of a company like Google is information privacy.

This comment is obviously an utter and complete waste of space, but I couldn't resist pointing out the irony of someone called "lucifer" failing to see how something is evil.

Re: Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

#102

Post by MattCutts »

barrkel wrote: post #48
MattCutts wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a support channel for appeals, and it sounds like hizook.com submitted an appeal via that channel earlier this week. My guess is that the Google team is already looking into it; I just wanted to let people know that I'd ask the relevant team from my side as well. Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would b…

It seems to me that the way you deal with having too many users to economically support is to have a support route with a high barrier to entry. That's not to say that the route should be hidden; but, for example, it could cost money, which is refundable in the case where there's a genuine grievance.

barrkel, I can speak to some of the thinking on the search result ranking side. I believe the feeling has been that asking people to pay for support creates worse incentives, because it turns something that people shouldn't have to do (contact Google for support) into a source of revenue.

It's a similar situation to pay-for-inclusion in the search index: a search engine should include as many pages/sites in its index as possible, and if someone can pay the search engine to include their site, then it creates a weird incentive for the search engine to not do a great job of crawling the web.

At least on the organic/ranking side, that's at least part of the reason why Google has never done pay-for-inclusion or pay-for support for webmasters.

Re: Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

#103

Post by swombat »

MattCutts wrote: post #100
patio11 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/01/my-adwords-are-turned-of... Here's the short version of my recent experience: Half of my business comes from AdWords and I'm pretty happy with it. Actually, you could go substantially farther than that: I'm literally a case study for it, recommend it any chance I get, and despite what I'm about to tell you continue to recommend it. One day, for no reason I could be certain of, AdWo…

I'm glad that the ads are running again. Reading through your blog post, it seems entirely possible that the @welcome variable not being defined could cause an issue with conversion tracking (although I don't have any first-hand knowledge). I wonder if the AdWords rep worked to make sure that the issue got escalated/resolved, but was working under the impression that you didn't need to be contacted back afterwards?

Then that support rep needs to go on a very basic, low level training course, to find out the basic truth that "if you've done the work, you should at least make a token effort to get the credit for the work".

I never understand people who go to all sorts of lengths to get something done and then don't get back to you to let you know that it's been done. It always seems suspicious to me (though I like to remind my self not to ascribe to malice what can be perfectly well explained by incompetence).

Re: Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

#105

Post by MattCutts »

Ardit20 wrote: post #88
MattCutts wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a support channel for appeals, and it sounds like hizook.com submitted an appeal via that channel earlier this week. My guess is that the Google team is already looking into it; I just wanted to let people know that I'd ask the relevant team from my side as well. Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would b…

"Given the hundreds of millions of users" - I doubt that anyone who is using Google for search purposes will need to contact customer support. Tens of millions of webmasters - I would suggest that only a fraction of them would need to call customer support, same with the publishers and advertisers. Banks also have millions of customers, just when the call center is busy, they are put on hold. I think the best investm…

"I doubt that anyone who is using Google for search purposes will need to contact customer support."

You'd be surprised. There's still some people who think that when they type in a query, people at Google manually decide which results to show. For every result on the page. For every query. Hundreds of millions of times a day.

A lot of those searchers do a search for "John Smith" and then want to talk about why their school friend John Smith wasn't #1 instead of that other John Smith.

That's doesn't negate your point; I'm just saying that orders of magnitude more people want to contact Google than there are Google employees, and many of those people want to have prolonged discussions with Google. So the challenge is to find scalable ways to communicate with those people.

Re: Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

#106

Post by jhancock »

barrkel wrote: post #48
MattCutts wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a support channel for appeals, and it sounds like hizook.com submitted an appeal via that channel earlier this week. My guess is that the Google team is already looking into it; I just wanted to let people know that I'd ask the relevant team from my side as well. Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would b…

It seems to me that the way you deal with having too many users to economically support is to have a support route with a high barrier to entry. That's not to say that the route should be hidden; but, for example, it could cost money, which is refundable in the case where there's a genuine grievance.

Google doesn't have too many users to "economically" support. They are simply reaping higher profits by not scaling support along with revenue.

Re: Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

#107

Post by rbanffy »

MattCutts wrote: post #42
patio11 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As happy as I am that you're Google's unofficial ombudsman, Matt, you're a big billion dollar company who many of us are intensely reliant on for our businesses. There needs to be a support channel other than "make a PR issue for Google and Matt Cutts will swoop by to save the day". I had a big issue with AdWords earlier this month. Google made it all but impossible for me to reach anyone about it. Earlier this year,…

There is a support channel for appeals, and it sounds like hizook.com submitted an appeal via that channel earlier this week. My guess is that the Google team is already looking into it; I just wanted to let people know that I'd ask the relevant team from my side as well. Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would b…

"There is a support channel for appeals,"

When I asked them to reinstate my account when I was blocked (a good couple years ago) for, what they told me, click-fraud, they took a couple days and said something in the line of "we looked into it and we were right, but we can't tell you what or how we identified it". In other words, people are punished and they can't even look at the evidence that bases the accusation.

That's really bad feedback.

And the balance was of about US$ 50.

Re: Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

#108

Post by gojomo »

skolor wrote: post #79
olefoo wrote: post #25

Two points: 1. This is not a problem with Google's Customer Service, it is a problem with their vendor relations. When Google publishes ads on your site, you are selling that space to them. Google is your customer and isn't obligated to tell you a damn thing except that they don't want to buy from you anymore. 2. There is a market opportunity here for an ad network that is willing to find good sites dropped from Goog…

One thing I would like to point out: Going from 100 hits a day to over 10,000 hits a day does NOT look like regular traffic. If anything, it looks more like bot activity than anything, which is definitely against the ToS, and would be plenty reason to shut down your account. I'm not in the position to do so, but if I ran an advertisements, and suddenly saw 100x the regular users hitting the site, I'd be pulling the a…

Google's ad-insert can see the referrer field; they can confirm that the site is really linked from the originating site. With their toolbar and analytics data and giant AdSense network, they know better than anyone how much traffic an outlink from these sites sends.

So while they know the surge is different, they should also know exactly how it's different, and that it's not "bot activity". Holding back ads from all such ephemeral traffic would make sense -- and serving appropriate lower-value ads the most sense -- but banning the account does not.

Re: Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

#109

Post by calcnerd256 »

patio11 wrote: post #29
MattCutts wrote: post #22

I'm happy to ask the right team at Google about this and point them to the post on hizook.com.

As happy as I am that you're Google's unofficial ombudsman, Matt, you're a big billion dollar company who many of us are intensely reliant on for our businesses. There needs to be a support channel other than "make a PR issue for Google and Matt Cutts will swoop by to save the day". I had a big issue with AdWords earlier this month. Google made it all but impossible for me to reach anyone about it. Earlier this year,…

"Beware the Leopard" is only written on disused lavatory stalls.

Re: Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

#110

Post by jhancock »

jasonkester wrote: post #33
olefoo wrote: post #25

Two points: 1. This is not a problem with Google's Customer Service, it is a problem with their vendor relations. When Google publishes ads on your site, you are selling that space to them. Google is your customer and isn't obligated to tell you a damn thing except that they don't want to buy from you anymore. 2. There is a market opportunity here for an ad network that is willing to find good sites dropped from Goog…

Well said. Further to the above, Google had a very good reason to drop this particular site: Over the span of a week, their impression count shot through the roof with the sort of traffic that never clicks ads. So all Google sees is a whole ton of 0.0000001% clickthru impressions coming from a former backwater site. If my ads were serving there, I'd certainly want them pulled. Granted, Google is terrible when it come…

I thought advertisers were paying for clicks, not impressions? Why should the advertisers be upset if they are getting lots of free impressions?

If your answer has something to do with "it messes up their math" in terms of knowing how well an ad performs, all I can say is "that's a math problem".

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