The Google Slap, in case you aren’t familiar with the term, is a nasty little punishment that Google wages against Adwords advertisers that don’t live up to Google expectations.  It’s punitive, uncompromising, and completely non-customer centered.

Let me lay out my story for you.

I’ve been running Google Adwords campaigns for years from the same account, for several different niche websites.  I’ve never had a problem with them — I’ve always diligently followed the rules:

  1. No squeeze pages.
  2. Content-based landing pages.
  3. Keywords matching the landing pages.

In fact, the majority of my landing pages have always been plain old article pages directly from my website — nothing fancy.

I had a pretty good thing going here… then I made a silly mistake.

For some reason, I got in a hurry and didn’t set up a proper article-type page for a new campaign that I started.  Instead, it was a php redirect to an affiliate sales page.  It ran for about six weeks and I made a killing with it — then Google caught it.

My sales plumetted and it didn’t take very long to figure out that I had been the victim of the dreaded Google Slap!

Every one of my landing pages in every campaign I was running (not just the offending campaign) carried a 1/10 rating.  That means that NONE of my campaigns were showing for any domain or product I was promoting through Google Adwords.

Further investigation revealed that Google also dropped my pagerank for iMarketingWatch.com site from a PR3 or PR4 to a PR1.

I immediately deleted the offending ads and hoped that Google would return my “good” campaigns to their normal 7/10-5/10 ratings.  Days went by and there was no change in my account status.

Then I deleted ALL my campaigns and started over fresh with brand new campaigns that went to articles that I have running on my blogs on other domains.  They were only designed to generate traffic, not sales, but Google ranked them at a 1/10 too, making it impossible to run the campaigns.

I repeatedly emailed Google to see if they would review my account, see that I was following the rules, and maybe stop punishing me for my one error in all these years.  They never answered my questions.

They did manage to send me an automated survey to see if I was satisfied with customer service however.

Google Slap experts claim that once you’ve been slapped you should get rid of the offending domain and start over with a new domain.  They claim that once you’ve been slapped, your site can never recover and make it back into Google’s good graces.  I haven’t decided if I want to dump iMarketingWatch.com and start over or not.  I sure hate to start over!

Apparently, you can never use the Google Adwords account that’s been slapped again either.

I deleted my account over the weekend and moved all my advertising dollars over to Yahoo.

I don’t know if starting a new account at Google would allow me to continue working with Adwords, but I’ve heard horror stories about Google tracking your IP or credit card and giving you the old Google Slap again on your new account.

Frankly, I’m not too inclined to give Google a second chance, despite it’s enormous search engine market share.  At Yahoo I’m paying less money per click and getting keywords that I would never be able to afford at Google — even before the Google Slap.

Although Yahoo generates a lot fewer impressions than Google, Yahoo seems to remember that advertisers are customers and they treat them like customers.

Obviously, Google doesn’t really care about it’s customers.  Rather than being punitive, they could easily just disable the offending campaigns for any advertiser – but they choose to brutally punish advertisers instead.

I guess you can do whatever you want when you’re the 800 lb. Gorilla.

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