Getting Back Into Adwords…I Thought!
Part of my 2011 goals had been to get back into Adwords for my niche sites that have shown promise. I had run some campaigns back in 2009 with some success. I just didn’t have the time or budget for a large scale investment in it at that time. This year, I pledged to get back into it a little bit at a time until I was running a fairly large group of Adwords groups.
I selected as my first site one that has been busting my goals since about six months into the project. A partnership I had set up for it had run into a roadblock due to the partner’s health. The partner was an expert at the niche the site was built on and I was counting on them for a good block of content and community engagement. With that temporarily on hold, I decided Adwords would be perfect to send more traffic to the site until it could be resolved. The site has a great foundational educational product that I had reviewed extensively so I thought that would be a great place to start.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
The Nightmare Begins
I did extensive keyword research and had picked out a small group of long-tail phrases that had good search volume and reasonable competition. I had just used one of the coupons they send for established accounts so I thought I was ready to go. I set up my first ad group and ad and submitted it. I was moving on to my next group when I noticed the first ad showed “disapproved”. Disapproved? Before going any further I knew I had to resolve this because. I got an email in a little while that said the ad had been disapproved due to “Site Policy”. Reading further, it appears the product review I did which was 100% unique content was cited as a bridge page. In other words, the page, in Google’s eyes did little more than tell the visitor to buy the product and sent them to the merchant with a link.
Not at all!!! The page referenced contained a 1000+ word, unique, non-cut-and-pasted review that looked at every aspect of the product. Yes, it did have a link to the merchant in it but added significant value to the visitor beyond that link.
Long story short: after numerous email exchanges I finally got them to say their main problem was that it wasn’t unique. I sent them a CopyScape report showing it hadn’t been stolen from anywhere and was original.
Then It Just Got Ridiculous
They countered by sending me a list of every site that had SCRAPED(yes, I said scraped-stolen)my content from another review and claimed that was why it wasn’t unique. Forget that all of those scraper sites did point back to me. That was as good as they could come up with. More emails and they refused to admit their error. I just don’t have any more time for this.
So, where am I? I’ve got a killer site I can’t send Adwords traffic to. I’ve got an Adwords balance I can’t use for this site. I guess that’s why we have to be so flexible in our industry. You never know when you’ll hit an impasse and have to maneuver around it.
My Advice To You
If you haven’t been running an Adwords campaign in a while I wouldn’t use their coupon to get back into it. I know this sounds paranoid but I really do believe this has something to do with it. I would also make sure you send traffic to a page that hasn’t been scraped(good luck with that)and provides more than a link to a merchant site.
My Question For You
If you ARE currently running Adwords campaigns could you please tell me how you get around the bridge page/site policy/non-unique content nonsense? Or have you been running bridge pages forever and I was just unlucky to start a new campaign now? Any advice you can give on your Adwords experience would be greatly appreciated. If not, where are you doing your PPC for the best bang? How is the new Adcenter?
Beyond that, do you think there is any point in me fighting this further? How do you fight the unique content thing when they’re claiming scraped content is your fault?
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