Yesterday, I was going over a long-time affiliate’s stats and noticed that his PPC traffic had dropped down to nothing late Friday. Worried about an affiliate with whom I have developed a great relationship, I emailed him to find out what was going on. He emailed me back late last night. He had dreaded news; Adwords has shut down all his accounts. Why?

Some of you may remember last year when Google stepped up its policies and policing efforts closing many pages that it deemed not relevant or scams. This effected many HD Publishing Group affiliates. After a quick Google search this morning, you can find numerous similar sad stories of Adwords accounts recently shut down littering the net. When your account comes under scrutiny there is not much you can do except follow Adwords guidelines and hope your account is reinstated. Unfortunately, Adwords is under no obligation to take you back if they deem you to be a problem. If this has happened to you, you are not alone.

What proactive steps can you take to avoid having your account suspended? Every online marketer using Google Adwords should review Adwords’ Advertising Policies.

Remember, all ads in the AdWords program will be reviewed. If your ads do not meet Adwords guidelines or are performing poorly, they will notify you by email. Adwords will often stop running your ads until you’re able to make the necessary changes. As soon as you’ve made and saved the changes, your ads are automatically resubmitted to Adwords for review.

Farazdak Nasrulla of Google Blog Site posted “…many customers who want to use AdWords and do not know how to use it outsource it to third party providers. These providers are contacted through any project bidding site. There these customers post their requirements and set a budget that they think they can afford. Many of the providers bid on those projects. Some providers bid as low as $50 for a project that is worth $500. Looking at the affordable price many customers award these AdWords projects to these providers…After a few days the AdWords customer gets very disappointed and posts a negative remark against the provider in the project bidding system. And then after a few days their account also gets suspended.

So what would be the solution to prevent such situations from occurring? The solution lies in searching for a good provider who has the necessary credentials for optimizing an AdWords account.”

Things you should know (following is pulled directly from Adwords):

Adwords has restrictions on duplicate content. If Adwords find that there is no unique content between your site and your affiliate’s or reseller’s site, Adwords will link your site to theirs. Affiliates or resellers may also be linked to each other for this reason.

AdWords won’t show multiple ads leading to identical or similar landing pages at the same time. This is true even if the pages have different domains. Try refining your site so that one of the following is true: your site contains additional products which are not found on your parent company’s or other advertisers’ sites, or your site serves a different purpose than your parent company’s or other affiliates’ or resellers’ sites.

Review Adwords Content Policy Overview. Some restrictions of which you should be aware:

• Don’t promote inflating ad clicks or impressions. Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of inflating clicks or impressions on ads, such as pay-to-click, pay-to-view, auto-surfing, automated ad clicking, and other guaranteed traffic programs.
• Accurately represent your product or service. Your ads and keywords must directly relate to the content on the landing page for your ad. When users see your ad, they should be able to understand what kind of product, service, or other content they will find on your site. Products or services promoted in your ad must be reflected on your landing page; ads can be disapproved if a promoted product is not offered or available for sale as promised. As a basic rule, use clear, descriptive, and specific ad content that highlights the differentiating characteristics of your product/service. You can distinguish your ad by including your company name, line of business, or by highlighting one specific product. If you offer a local service or product, you might want to indicate your location in your ad.
• Support competitive claims. Competitive claims are statements implying that your product/service is better than a competitor’s. If your ad text contains competitive language regarding other companies, specific support for this claim must be displayed on the landing page for your AdWords ad.
• Support advertised prices, discounts, and free offers. If your ad includes a price, special discount, or ‘free’ offer, it must be clearly and accurately displayed on your website within 1-2 clicks of your ad’s landing page.
• Don’t use unacceptable phrases. Avoid call-to-action phrases such as ‘click here’ that could apply to any ad, regardless of content. This includes phrases in the third line of your ad that lead into your display URL, such as ‘See this site:’.
• Your site must allow a browser’s ‘Back’ button to work. Links to your website must allow users to enter and exit the landing page easily. Once reaching your site, a user must be able to return to the page where they found and clicked on your ad by clicking once on their Internet browser’s ‘Back’ button.

• Display URL must be accurate. Your display URL must accurately reflect the landing page URL of the website you’re advertising. It should match the domain of your landing page so that users will know which site they’ll be taken to when they click on your ad.

HD Publishing Group is committed to offering you the best services to promote. We recommend that you add additional services and helpful information to your pages often to ensure that your site is unique, relevant and dynamic. Work on your SEO rankings to guarantee that you are not whole relying solely on one ad publisher as your main advertising source.

If you submit a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, it helps Google to better understand of your site. It can be especially good if your content is not easily discoverable by crawler.

Few people thinks that adding a sitemap influence the ranking/crawler but it is clear myth. Sitemap doesn’t affect the ranking of your pages. It helps only get more crawled of your site.

Setting a top priority (1.0) will not help in high ranking as well. In Google words, “priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact the ranking of your pages in search results.”

Google recommend the XML Sitemap protocol as defined by sitemaps.org because it can easily upgrade and more comprehensive than an Atom or RSS feed, feeds usually only list your most recent URLs.

If you have a multiple sections e.g. blog, a forum then you may submit as few or you can add up to 500.

Here are the 12 different languages Google Webmaster Central Group:

1- English Google Webmaster Central Group
2- French Google Webmaster Central Group
3- Italian Google Webmaster Central Group
4- German Google Webmaster Central Group
5- Spanish Google Webmaster Central Group
6- Dutch Google Webmaster Central Group
7- Swedish Google Webmaster Central Group
8- Finnish Google Webmaster Central Group
9- Polish Google Webmaster Central Group
10- Portuguese Google Webmaster Central Group
11- Russian Google Webmaster Central Group
12- Danish Google Webmaster Central Group

“We want to bring information to people in any way that we can,” said Georges Harik, director of Googlettes (new platforms and offerings) at Google. “This way you can just be walking around or be in a coffee shop or be waiting for a train and use it from anywhere. A lot of local information is really useful.”

“Right now we’re sort of gathering feedback and seeing how people use it,” said Harik. “To the extent that ads will be useful to consumers, we’ll be likely to deliver them. If we don’t think they’d be useful, then we won’t.”

“I think we’re going to evaluate what we get out of the tests here,” said Harik. “One of the things important to note is that Local was pioneered in the U.S. ahead of other places. We eventually intend to provide all of the services everywhere.” Google already offers Web search for phones and handhelds that have WAP browsers, through its Google Wireless service. That service “translates” HTML pages into wireless markup language (WML) so wireless users can view ordinary Web sites more easily.

The service works on U.S. carriers, including AT&T Wireless, Cingular, Nextel, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint PCS. On the other hand,  Google’s rival Yahoo recently began paying more attention to its mobile initiatives. The company started allowing users to post photos to Flickr via their camera phones, and it ran a contest to encourage such use.

They are encouraging AdWord Editor, for campaigns management because it includes other useful campaign management tools that help to manage keywords.

Message Center is providing information in all supported Webmaster Tools languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, Korean, Japanese, etc.), across all countries.

Adam Lasnik offered a post about Best Uses of Flash. He mentioned that Google is able to read the content of flash file but not all forms of Flash.

Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation.

It means if you use flash movie in your site, then you moved away from the search engine friendly site and your site will get low search traffic after put it up.

For using the rounded corner, visit the ‘Adsense setup” tab. With all format options like sizes and colors, you will find three different corners in ‘Corner Styles’ heading.

Google in the official AdSense blog says that they’re “also working to give you even more choices to customize your ad formats.”