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Some sales and a ban. A week of ups and downs

Hi All. Wanted to share my topsy turvy story. So - I'm not quite sure how to feel this week.

On the one hand I launched my Nextjs + TailwindCSS landing page templates. And it got great reception on PH and HN! Even got a snarky comment or two from the latter which means I'm getting noticed lol.

You can check the website out here => https://nextails.com/

So far this week, I had notched up about a $150 in sales on Gumroad.

I was really encouraged by this so I decided to double down and run some Ads. I ran ads on Twitter and Reddit and got a couple more sales (woo!). I then decided to try Google Ads (people actually searching for Nextjs & TailwindCSS templates would be a great group to target no?).

I setup an ad with the basic headline: Nextjs + TailwindCSS Landing Page Templates and tried different variations around this.

Boom - I launched the ad and went about my day. Only to come back a few hours later to a message from Google:

Your Google Ads account xxx has been suspended for violating our Circumventing Systems policy.

Wow.

WTF did I do? I checked my ad, my site. I've run lots of ads before. This was one of the most PG13 ads I've ever run. How am I circumventing anything? I ran ads for landing page templates which is what the site is about.

I dug into it. Circumventing essentially means I am somehow either showing personalized content for each user or redirecting them neither of which was true for this site.

I submitted an appeal and was confident this was some mistake their automated system had flagged and it would be sorted out. A few hours later I had a reply:

Hi,

Thank you for waiting while we reviewed your account suspension appeal.

After reviewing your case and taking your feedback into consideration, we've confirmed that your account was and still is in violation of our Google Ads policies.

As such, we will not be reactivating your account. Please don't create new Google Ads accounts, as these will be suspended too. When we suspend a Google Ads account, the suspension applies to the account owner and any current or future linked Google Ads accounts.

Ok...now I'm getting pissed. They gave me no reason what I did wrong. Same old corporate speak. I decided I needed to focus on the site and would deal with this later.

Around this time, I happened to see an HN post about someone who had their business almost shut down by google and joined in the convo about my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033

A person replied to my comment: "FYI you’re also blocked by some lists on NextDNS, consequently I couldn’t view your site. I bet that’s a consequence of the google issue, best of luck solving this."

FML.

Now I'm scared. This is potentially going beyond my ad account. Are they delisting my site? Does this impact my other sites? What about the google services I use (gmail, etc)?

And what if there is a legit reason this is happening? Maybe my site is hacked or is running some malware. I frantically ran it through online tests. I added it to the Google webmaster. All came back with no security issues.

I am still not sure what happened/is happening. I did get a message from the person today telling me that now I am unblocked. Encouraged I appealed to google again to unban my ad account. This time I filled out the appeal in much more detail and added screenshots etc. I even added a plea to tell me what happened so I can take the steps to fix it.

A few hours later I got the same bs message:

Hi,

Thank you for waiting while we reviewed your account suspension appeal.

After reviewing your case and taking your feedback into consideration, we've confirmed that your account was and still is in violation of our Google Ads policies.

So yeah doesn't seem like a human looked at it. And that I have any hopes to get my account back. For now all I can do is to keep working on the product and hope this issue doesn't come get worse (getting my SEO delisted, getting on automated blacklists etc).

But f*** google. It makes me sick that I am so dependent on the whims of this one company.

  1. 2

    Did you try to have a look at the cached version?

    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://nextails.com/

    This story with Google ads is not uncommon, sadly, for many years, and I kinda don't get why it's so bad for so long kinda..
    Unlikely you'd see any affect on cross services AFAIK

    But if you run ads for multiple site that sucks hard, especially for ppl managing client accounts

    I can only stupidity guess it might somehow relate to the affects of text appearing suddenly on your page while scrolling? (Am guessing stupid static rendering won't match up to user activity, not really sure if it's a thing..)

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      Ah interesting - that's the aos library which relies on javascript. I don;t know..you'd think they would disapprove the ad rather than ban my account for something like that. But might give it a try. Thanks!

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    I didn't even know this is a problem people experience. I've used Google Ads since 2016 and have had no problems whatsoever with being banned. I actually have a YouTube video ad running right now for my business. Odd how one person goes years without being banned and another person gets banned in a matter of seconds.

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      So I love sweets. I eat dessert almost daily and have never had any health problems. But one of my friends who eats far less sugar than I do just got diagnosed with diabetes and is being told he needs to change his diet. Odd how one person can eat sweets and be totally fine yet this other person isn't.

      1. 1

        I think you accidentally replied to the wrong comment

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