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.

Here’s a blog page with some good tips.