Why Google Slapped or Banned Your Website

It’s a million dollar question for internet marketers, and it can be quite a complicated one as there are also a million possibilities why Google slapped your website.  Google does not slap a website for personal reasons.  In fact, Google is supposed to love every AdWords advertiser.

It’s very logical for Google to slap an account for something like violating its guidelines in making a good landing page.  A good landing page provides a good user experience.  Google wants its ads to show only authoritative sites that can be useful for the users.  This is because, when users land on a bad landing page through Google ads or search, he or she will not blame the site itself but only Google.  To protect its name, Google slaps accounts that violate its guidelines on how to be AdWords compliant.

This sounds fair enough, doesn’t it?  The only problem is that, it can be a tricky argument on how to be AdWords compliant.  One site can be compliant to a user, but before Google’s eyes, it might not be.  In 2008, you might have heard of stories on accounts which got banned after a Google Slap, and had a hard time to get back.  In the worst situation, the only way to cure this is to change the domain, according to experts.  Though some experts would have other proven strategy that helps.

Telling The Difference Between a Google Slap and a Google Ban

There’s a difference between a ban and a slap.  When your account gets the Google Slap, you get an entire group of keywords on your AdWords account penalized with a Quality Score of 1/10.  This is a blanket penalty that is expected to run across your entire keywords in one or more domain names promoted in your account.  This is not just a slap on one or two keywords and it can be an all or nothing penalty.

A Google ban would refer to an account that gets disabled.  Most commonly, a slap happens prior to an account getting entirely banned.  You can get multiple slaps before your account gets banned.  However, if you get a single slap, there is a possibility that you will not get another one before you get banned.  Once banned, your other AdWords associated to your personality can be banned too.  Google traces this association through identity verification information like your credit card details, IP address, and other data.

Top Three Reasons Why Google Slapped or Banned Your Website

So what does it take to prevent getting slapped?  It sounds as easy as finding out more about the guidelines that will prevent you from getting slapped.  Though, there are top 3 reasons that are identified as the most common issues why Google slapped your website.

First, your website could be the reason itself.  Before Google’s eyes, your website might not contain relevant, useful and unique content.  To be unique, your website needs to have content which should be totally different from what’s out there.  Having a useful and relevant landing page is also important as a user will blame Google for ads which lead to a bad website.

Second, you need to have quality keyword selection.  If you place too many keywords which are non-relevant, that can be a problem.  You have to select more targeted keywords which are more specific.  Having too many keywords in an ad group can also cause issues.  If you have too many, it is better to have multiple ad groups instead with smaller number of keywords rather than have one large group with a great number of keywords in it.

Third, bad click through rates can mean something else before Google’s eyes.  It translates as your ads performance to be that low as it is not shown enough to targeted audience and it does not get the desired number of clicks.  Thus, your ads will be assessed as non-relevant as nobody clicks on it.  The bottomline is that, what Google wants are highly relevant ads and search results to make the users happy.  This is also because Google earns more when somebody clicks on your ads, and this only happens if you have relevant and targeted keywords.