Google AdSense lockout (update).

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Philip Newman

For those of you who follow my blog you.  On the 12th of July Google decided to suspend my account only sending me an email saying:

Hello Philip J. Newman,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we have decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We realise the inconvenience that this may cause you and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions that we have taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by visiting https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153&hl=en_GB.

Yours sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

In the last few weeks I’ve been trying to get in contact with an actual person at Google who would be able to tell me why I was “a significant risk”.  Google doesn’t seem to understand that the information given to me does not help me in any way at all.  As a systems administrator from Primal Media it would be helpful to know “Why?” and even possibly “How to prevent this happening?”

“As this is not my area I wouldn’t expect you’ll hear back from me on it, but you should get some sort of response from the AdSense team – as a PR team we don’t comment publicly on individual cases” said Annie Baxter the Public Relations Manager for Australia and New Zealand via email.

While Ms Baxter has been very helpful and a credit to Public Relations at Google it would seem other departments are less than for coming with information.

The AdSence team have not replied to any of my correspondence.  I wondered if it was “Big Company Syndrome” the ability to not respond to customers because one person doesn’t matter to much to them.

I decided I’d send away some email messages today to see if any other companies knew how to reply to an email.

After a little research I started sending off emails.  Amazon, Microsoft, Dell and even AOL got the same email from me at 1300 hours local time.  Amazon replied personally within an hour saying in their reply that “The customer is very important to us.” The Amazon Employee asked not to be named.

Microsoft returned the email with “Of course we have real people here at Microsoft” and then proceeded to ask how I got his email.

Dell and AOL both called me on the phone to answer my enquiry better.

If all these companies can return emails how come Google, the provider of Gmail services can’t seem to do the same.

I’m still waiting to find out …

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