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[HELP] The Heartbreaking Impact of Google Ads Suspension on My Family’s Small Healthcare Clinic
I am writing to express the deep sense of worry and sadness that my mom and I are feeling due to Google’s recent suspension of our Google Ads account. This generates the majority of revenue for our small healthcare clinic, that my mother started 20 years ago. I was brought on board a few years ago to help. We have been utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) practices for the last decade but Google Ads is our primary source of revenue.
We had a digital marketing agency set up our ads account years ago, but now it seems that certain practices used in our campaigns have triggered Google’s suspension on Dec 15th. We are trying to fix the situation by following all guidelines provided by Google, but it’s really confusing and vague. We have also solicited help from a few freelancers, but they all seem to offer different solutions
I am truly at a loss here and hope that you can provide us with some direction so that we can get our account reinstated soon. We would really appreciate your help in this matter as our family’s livelihood depends on it. Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.
My website: http://www.brentwoodphysio.ca
Reason for suspension:
**Circumventing system** (THIS IS ALARMING & VERY SERIOUS – **More about this below**)
Malicious software (No scans are picking up any malicious software, but I believe this is fixable)
Destination not working (I believe this is fixable)
Non-family safe (I believe this is fixable)
Health in personalized advertising (I believe this is fixable)
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**Circumventing system**
The following is not allowed:
* Cloaking (I don’t think I have done this)
* Redirection to non-compliant content (The only redirect I have is “mywebsite.com” redirects to “www.mywebsite.com” ( **A fiverr guy said this is against google ads policy, is this true?**)
* Using dynamic DNS to switch page or ad content (**Not sure what this means**)
* Manipulating site content or restricting access to so many of your landing pages that it makes it difficult to meaningfully review your ad, site, or account (**I don’t think I have done this**)
* Using click trackers to redirect users to malicious sites ( **I have hot jar on the site, is this a click tracker?**)
* Repeated policy violations across any of your accounts, including creating new domains or accounts to post ads that are similar to ads that have been disapproved (**Have not done this**)
* Bypassing enforcement mechanisms and detection by creating variations of ads, domains or content that have been disapproved or using techniques (**Not sure what this means**)
* After a previous suspension decision, created new accounts in order to re enter the system (**Have not done this**)
* Abusing Google Ads product features in order to show policy non-compliant content to users and/or gain additional traffic (**I don’t think I have done this)**
I spent New Years Eve worried sick in front of my laptop racking my brain. Any help or insight would b greatly appreciated.
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1 Reply
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All of this is fixable, its just a question about how long time it will take.
Contact an agency with a good Google contact is my advice.
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Although I can’t provide any advice I do know how you feel, I had my own Google Ads account suspended a year or two ago and it’s such a horrible experience.
What annoyed me most were the vague descriptions and lack of information, I believe in the end it was due to me adding my card details to another account ( which I now realise is a stupid thing to do ).
I panicked and removed all of my campaigns as I didn’t know if any of them were causing the issue at the time, and although I appealed and my account was reinstated around a week later I still never got a proper explanation as to what the problem was.
When peoples livelihoods depend on it, and as we are their customers paying substantial amounts of money to them it’s crazy that Google treat people so badly, I guess they don’t really care as they make billions and no single customer is that important to them.
Good luck and I hope you get this resolved.
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First off: Happy new year 🙂
You’re completely right in that all of this is fixable. Please get rid of the freelancers you’re working with though. Most people ob fiverr or the likes are good when it comes to very basic stuff, but in my experience will rather tell you utter bullshit before doing proper research.
Here’s what I would do in your situation:
– Open a support ticket asking for help to fix your site’s problems
– Look at website changes made within ~60 days of the suspensions, see if any of those might cause trouble with Google’s guidelines
– Take a very literal approach to the guidelines and be strict with yourself. There haven’t been any recent policy changes so it must have come from an edit on your end
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One of my accounts was suspended for circumventing and after trying everything for months I changed the credit card and voilà! Account reinstated. It is indeed the most frustrating thing with no explanations and no one to speak to. You have to just try everything.
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1. Some suspension reasons might be not actually related to your problem. Getting rejected by any reasons can trigger other reason to be shown on account. Solving the actual reason will automatically solve others.
2. Destination not working — check URL in the ad. It shouldn’t be 404 or redirect. Change URL if needed
3. Non family safe — check website content. There shouldn’t be images with naked people, also be careful with images that show persons touching. Some sensors may look like nipples (eg cardiograph), remove such images. Don not use any images with needles and pricking. Remove or make neutral any text related to reproductive organs or reproductive function. Make sure you do bit guarantee a result – you still can guarantee the quality of services, but not the result or customer’s satisfaction. Do not use any text that is related to customers health or personal issues, be plain – “we provide this service” and that’s enough.
4. Health in personalized Ads — you can’t do anything about that. Just ignore
5. Malicious software — 1) scan website on malicious software and fraudulent links; 2) get as much information as you can about your hosting; don’t use cheap hosting as they can put anything on your website or also host dangerous websites which affects yours
6. Circumventing system — 1) make sure you don’t have another Google ads account working for your domain; 2) non-www to www redirect shouldn’t be an issue but again just do not use any redirects, final url is called final for a reason; 3) IMO this one is triggered as a result of continuing policy violations which you did not fit in time, fix all other violations first; 4) contact Google ads support to guide you
7. I wonder you didn’t get “Violation of Google Ads policy”. There is acupuncture on your website — I believe it’s prohibited in Google. Make sure you don’t have one mentioned on any landing page you use
8. Using syndrome or illness names are kinda prohibited but it usually can be resolved with a help of Google rep. Contact Google ads support multiple times if needed. But keep in mind that Google rep approval only affects those ads that you discussed in ticket. New ads will be disapproved for the same reasons and you will need to contact support again and again
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Sorry to hear you’re going through this. I will answer some of your “not sure” comments.
> Cloaking (I don’t think I have done this)
Cloaking is where you present one website to Google’s crawlers, and a different website to the public. You would know if you’re doing this, as you can’t do it by accident.
> Redirection to non-compliant content (The only redirect I have is “mywebsite.com” redirects to “www.mywebsite.com” ( A fiverr guy said this is against google ads policy, is this true?)
Redirecting to a www subdomain is normal and allowed.
> Using dynamic DNS to switch page or ad content (Not sure what this means)
You would know if you’re doing this, so if you don’t know what it means, don’t worry about it. In a nutshell, it means routing people to different IP addresses which show different content.
> Manipulating site content or restricting access to so many of your landing pages that it makes it difficult to meaningfully review your ad, site, or account (I don’t think I have done this)
Do you redirect or block specific visitors (e.g. Google’s crawlers) from seeing your website? If not, you’re not doing this.
> Using click trackers to redirect users to malicious sites ( I have hot jar on the site, is this a click tracker?)
No, Hot Jar is not malicious and nothing to worry about.
> Bypassing enforcement mechanisms and detection by creating variations of ads, domains or content that have been disapproved or using techniques (Not sure what this means)
Basically this means trying to get around previous warnings or suspensions by doing shady stuff. You’d know if you’re doing this.
> Abusing Google Ads product features in order to show policy non-compliant content to users and/or gain additional traffic (I don’t think I have done this)
Again, this one means you’re doing shady stuff and you’d definitely know if you’re doing this.
May I ask: did you do any shady SEO, redirects, or hidden content?
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All of this is fixable and likely was a result of some outage or something weird. My e-commerce sites on Shopify have 1000’s of products and occasionally google will tell me their urls are broken.
Open a support ticket and ask google for help.
Also, your fiver guy is completely wrong.
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I wouldn’t use a fiverr freelancer for this kind of job. Try searching for a local freelancer or local agency. You are more likely to develop an honest relationship, as they won’t want to tarnish their local reputation if they get something wrong.
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Another potential issue is that your site has been hacked. There are hacks that will change the content of a site to Google’s bots but when you visit the site directly the site will appear normal. I have seen this in the wild. The purpose of the hack is black hat SEO and it can also really mess up your organic rankings.
Google search console will generally detect this and warn you but if you don’t have access to your search console you might not notice for a while.
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Hey. I went through this myself not too long ago. Yep suggestions:
1. Email them every day to get it figured out.
2. Open a Microsoft AdWords account.
Also do you have legit scripts?
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This happened to my client and I had this company help https://jupplee.com/
They charged I think 1000 or 1500 but it was back up online after a few weeks. I even did a video review for them for their marketing
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Here is the best path to take:
1.call Google ads support and ask them to tell you which specific policy you have violated. They will normally be able to tell you and what the specific reason is.
I feel like your site may have been hacked temporarily and you are getting flagged for malware. It could also be a mistake.
IN ANY case you will need to call Google and have them manually review your account.
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Don’t screw around with a freelancer if this is important. It’s unlikely a freelancer will have a good contact at Google, and you’re going to waste a bunch of time trying to find a freelancer who knows what they’re doing.
Suck it up and find a Google partner, preferably a premier partner that is local to you. The bigger, the better because they’ll be more likely to have a contact at Google that can help if they have any issues getting you back up and running.
Here’s the partner directory.
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I’m more an expert in paid search than anything else, but I dabble in server integrations from time to time and one thing that strikes me as odd is the dynamic DNS flag here.
Upon closer inspection I can see that you’re running two “a” records in your DNS, as to which I’m not sure why – especially as you’re not farmiliar with DNS records! (see: [https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx%3abrentwoodphysio.ca&run=toolpage](https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx%3abrentwoodphysio.ca&run=toolpage))
These are two Cloudflare IPs – when did you start using Cloudflare? Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like you should only be using one IP for your “a” record here. This could be causing some of the other issues imo.
(FYI the “a” record is the DNS record that tells a computer the IP address to connect to once someone types in your web address – I’m not sure you need 2 Cloudflare ones here…)
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yeah circumveting systems is very much solvable, dont worry about it. Find someone who has a proven track record and get him to solve it. If nothing happens contact me, i will do it for you. But i will agree that try someone local first.
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