Google Hates Bronies · 6:43am Feb 21st, 2018
I've been trying to place ads on fimfiction and Equestria Daily using Google AdWords, to advertise the writers' workshop scholarship. Here's one ad:
I've spent most of the past 2 days making and placing these ads. I got some on fimfiction yesterday via Project Wonderful, but Google AdWords won't let me post them. They say my ads violate their "Webmaster Guidelines".
These are the guidelines:
Specific guidelines
Avoid the following techniques:
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content
- Cloaking
- Sneaky redirects
- Hidden text or links
- Doorway pages
- Scraped content
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
- Abusing rich snippets markup
- Sending automated queriesto Google
So they're not objecting to the ad itself; they're objecting to the page it links to: my blog about the scholarship.
These objections, though, are about spam, scraped content--things of no value. The "Webmaster Guidelines" is just a big list of things they think people won't want to be linked to because they're worthless.
In other words, some employee at Google AdWords goes to the URL for my ad, sees it's a pony blog, and says, "Nope."
That's a shame, but doesn't surprise me too much. Everyone's first response, in general, tends to be negative towards this fanbase until they start watching episodes. I wonder if they'd do the same with something like Rick and Morty, or Steven Universe? Anyway, thanks for making such a big effort.
No one at Google manually reviews ads unless they're reported (and oftentimes not even then). The fact that you're linking to a very specific page out of hundreds of thousands of similar pages in the same domain on a website you don't even own is probably tripping some alarm—the algorithm thinks that you're up to something even if it doesn't specifically know what.
That is a shame.
Even I'm having a hard time taking the "fimfiction scholarship" seriously though. It sounds like a scam or some get rich sceme targetted at bronies. Why not just drop that part entirely?
I'm guessing more that trying to put the ad on pages from the same domain it's linking to is making it look like some kind of SEO referral scheme.
In my experience with Google's services, I've found Google's policy is to put in place an automated system simply because they can't be bothered to manually do things like that--it's beneath them.
It's Trump's fault.
4802048 is right; I'm over 99% certain this is the result of falling afoul of an algorithm rather than a human. I mean, if humans pre-reviewed ads, do you think that online advertising would have a pervasive malware problem?
4802070 seems very relevant. Do you have an external blog or website you could repost the information to, to see if it's treated differently?
4802050
Drop the "fimfiction scholarship" part? That's the whole thing. That's all it is.
4802274 4802250 4802048 If it's automated, why does it take 4 hours?
(I have a livejournal account and a facebook page, horizon, but I doubt either would fare better.)
4802070 There's (stupidly) no way to specify what domain you want an AdWords ad to run on, except by giving the domain name as a keyword. So they can't know where I want the ad to run.
4802284
I don't know then. Maybe it's just me after getting I don't know how many emails about scholarships in my inbox whilst I was at university.