This is the question asked in a recent thread over at SERoundtable. The infamous AdwordsAdvisor explained “Much of Google’s income comes from AdWords advertising, as is well known - and it is not to anyone’s advantage to ‘toss aside’ advertisers without an excellent reason for doing so. Put another way, when and if advertisers are ‘let go’, it is done for excellent reasons - and in most cases after repeated warnings.”

Well, I thought I would put this to the test. I had been advertising against keywords and including content within my adverts that were against the Google Adwords content policy and thought I might aswell have a little fun…

Everyone knows that generally speaking any Google advert will start running immediately (unless it gets filtered/blocked straight away which does happen) and then at a later date the advert will go through editorial which can be anything from a few days to a few weeks in my experience.

If you are bidding on terms or have adverts that are against Google’s content policies or their guidelines you will have your keywords, advert or both disapproved. Obviously your ads stop running until you make amends to stay within Googles guidelines. However, if you amend your advert, even very slightly you will find that they once again start running until they come under editorial review. As I mentioned, this could be just a few days or even a couple of weeks.

It doesn’t matter whether your advert or keywords are disapproved - I found that if it’s the advert, I just needed to amend it a little. For example if its the content, I could just change the odd word or stick a hypen in there. If its the destination url I just needed to make a small amend, like changing the destination page on the same site, take out the ‘http://’ on a affiliate url which acts as a bridge or add it if I was only starting with ‘www.’. Thats all it takes to get your advert re-accepted to run until the editorial review.

If it’s the keywords themselves that have been disapproved aswell, you can ‘edit your keywords’, strip them right out, save with nothing, then paste them straight back in and ’save’. In my test, after doing this my adverts always started running again. Both my adverts and keywords were disapproved each time after editorial, so I would start the process again.

This takes just seconds to do and basically puts your adverts back up and running while they wait for another editorial review….

So how many times can get away with this until Google catch on or get a little upset?. Well, from my tests, I got up to 20 seperate advert amends over a period of a couple of months using the techniques above before being sent this mail…I have added (blank) to the e-mail to stop any possible identification to my publisher.

Hello PPCBlogger,

It has come to our attention that despite multiple disapprovals, you
have repeatedly submitted ads that violate our Editorial Guidelines and
{blank) policies. Please know that if you submit these
ads again, we will be unable to run any of your AdWords ads in the future.

We value the quality of our program highly. In order to create an
environment where our users can trust our advertisers and continue to
receive quality advertising, we ask that you cease submitting ads that
violate our Editorial Guidelines and/or policies.

For your account to remain active in the future, please make the
following changes to your ad text/site content:

Remove references to 'blank' from your ad text and
website.

(Offending Advert Here)

For more information about our Content Policy Guidelines, please visit
https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

So I guess in summary, you can go quite far. So shall I amend that advert again?!