Google AdWords Bullying Small Business and Refusing to Accept or Admit their own Mistakes (False Positives) earn by blogging adsense income

This may get long, but it's important that I share it.

I am a web developer and recently had a client who wanted a completely new website. I built them a fairly typical WordPress/WooCommerce setup with a lot of custom code and changes. We designed the theme, did photography, etc. I set the website up on Digital Ocean and used a Let's Encrypt SSL. The website goes live and all is well until my client tries to put ads up for the new site. They had already run many ads on their old site.

This is where the frustration begins. At first we were denied the ad and told our site contained malicious code or unwanted software. They sent us a list of literally every single asset on the website and told us they were all malicious and to "remove those links" and try again. Obviously this is bogus and not even doable or the entire site would break. The list included every page, style sheet, script, image, etc. that the website was comprised of.

We ran several malware scans and they all came back clean. Google Webmaster Tools said our site was clean so we challenged the decision and (about 2 weeks later) got an email telling us that this time we were denied because of a phishing page. They told us to remove the phishing page but they were not able to tell us where the page was or anything about it. We literally were told "it has a phishing page and must be removed".

Again, we challenged this and a few weeks later got a 3rd denial telling us the site contained bad links but yet again they couldn't tell us what links, where those links were or anything about them. They just told us to hire a "professional company" to fix it for us.

However, throughout this entire process my client had hired numerous companies to check the security of the website and help him clean it up. Every single company returned back and said their was nothing wrong, everything is clean and good to go. Only Google continued to refuse us ads and tell us our site was malicious or somehow breaking the ToS.

Finally my client decides to put his old website backup and reapply for the ads. He does so and is approved almost instantly. At the same time, we moved the new website to a subdomain so I could continue to investigate the issue. I put up a new SSL (another Let's Encrypt) for the subdomain but made no other changes. After about a week of running ads, my client applies for ads on the new subdomain and he is instantly approved. Same site, same server, same everything as before, just a new SSL and on a subdomain.

First off, I am very bothered by this as Google clearly made a false positive but refused to admit it and even told me on the phone (we had several phone calls with a 'Bradley' in India from Google AdWords Technical Support) that they don't make mistakes and they have the most sophisticated software in the world to detect this. So sophisticated that it can't even identify what it detects.

Secondly, I'm discouraged because had my client not believed me and wanted to sue for lost revenue or whatever, he probably had a case and I would have lost more money than I made over something completely ridiculous.

I just want this to story to be heard so people realize that Google does make mistakes, does claim false positives, but refuses to admit or accept it. I found many instances of people dealing with the same problem. A lot of them did have real issues that were resolved by hiring an outside company but some did not. My client is not the most IT savvy and had I not stuck by his side and helped him through this, he would have been another guy bullied by Google into not being able to run ads over completely false pretenses.

I have all of the emails and would gladly share them if requested. This entire scenario played out over 2 months with a final resolution of, essentially, "your website is infected but we can't tell you how or why or where or anything more. Please refer to our Google Webmaster Tools for more information". At no time did GWT ever detect an issue. Even after relaying that information, we were essentially called liars and wrong. It was a very negative experience but I want people to be aware that this is going on. I'm sure my client isn't the only one.

PS: I purposely left out links as I don't want this to be seen a way of gaining traffic. I want the message to get out more than anything.

submitted by /u/KevinACrider
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