Is Google losing prestige in affiliate marketing!?

Google isn't a monopoly, there's other players in the field. Learn to live without the big G.

Follow the rules and you won't get banned. Google has always been about user experience; if you give the user a good experience your site will be fine... I admit I've used some shady cpa re-bill offers in the past but I stopped once people started making a major stink about it several months back. After that it was all quality sites in my Adwords account... If I wanted to test the waters with some questionable offer, I'd use Yahoo or MSN.

Google isn't trying to run affiliates out of Adwords, they're trying to keep their brand name strong... If everyone thinks that clicking on an Adwords ad just leads to a half-assed landing page leading to a free trial offer that's going to screw them over, then that hurts Google's brand; I'd do the same if I was Google and you probably would too...

Think about it; if readers of your blog complained that they bought from one of your sponsor ads and the guy scammed them, you'd take the ad down and never let that person advertise on your site ever again.

Yeah, I was one of the accounts Google banned. They didn't even give an example of a bad group I was running or any kind of warning. In fact, I think I deleted the ad I think they banned me over close to 4 months ago. It was a "Make Money With Twitter" type of offer.

The only ads I had running now were for my personal custom printing websites. I know they aren't scams. The only thing I think might have been wrong with them is that I didn't have a lot of information/text on the homepages that I was linking to. If they would have given me a warning first I probably would have put up some kind of text filled information page and changed the link to that.

I'm glad I didn't rely on Google for much of my traffic. If I had been earning $1,000's a month and I had my account canceled I don't know what I would have done.

Dennis Graves

I haven't been banned yet but am sure that it's coming. I don't promote anything remotely dodgy but am sure that I'm going to get dragged down by some of the morons that think it's clever to continue to promote rebills or Google cash. You still see posts made by idiots claiming that they are continuing to get away with it. These are the types of affiliates that you need to blame for your account ban. There is too much lying and deception that goes on in affiliate marketing and I empathise with Google to the extent that they need to disassociate themselves from these idiots (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE). Anybody that's promoted a weightloss product claiming that you can lose 20 pounds in two weeks, products that claim that they can make you grow taller or products that claim you can run your car or water etc etc deserve everything that they get in my opinion.

The other thing is landing pages. Read a post yesterday on this forum by a bloke that had been banned and couldn't understand why and included a link to his landing page. And OMG - I think that half the class in kindergarten could have done much better. I don't think that it's unreasonable for Google not to want these types of advertisers on their network.

What I do strongly disagree with is that Google seems to be implementing a blanket ban for many affiliates that don't appear to have done anything remotely wrong. This is unnacceptable and nicely illustrates why we should go to great lengths to legislate against monopolies. This as really annoyed me to the extend that I'm decided that I'm going to market Bing - try and persuade everyone that I know to switch over to it.

In conclusion I think that that there are lot of shady internet marketers that have got away with deception for too long. What's unacceptable is that a monopoly is responding with blanket bans, often with no real rationale, at the expense of the majority who play the game with honesty and integrity.

Cheers,

Andy