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Being Blacklisted: One Man's Tale

What happens when you link a personal Gmail address to an AdWords account and that account gets banned by Google for suspicious activity? You get blacklisted indefinitely, according to Jay Weintraub, and when your livelihood depends on working with Google's paid search platform, the outlook is bleak.

Weintraub says that he didn't try to game the system or spam users. He simply used the same computer to work on multiple client accounts--which triggered Google's automatic account fraud detection mechanisms.

And the process for clearing his name, his Gmail account and even his IP-addresses has been fraught with "arrogance, lack of information, and unwillingness to help by Google employees who find themselves in the position of power" and have "almost unquestioning trust in their system's correctness in dispensing sentencing," Weintraub says. "Without a doubt, you are presumed Guilty, but you will not be allowed to prove your innocence."

Weintraub says he wrote the post not just for himself--as he's been able to "get along" and promote his own upcoming conference without using any Google products--but to enlighten business owners who depend on the giant as their primary marketing tool.

"You could blame [them] for not diversifying, not figuring out display or email or not doing scale with other engines, but anyone who actually spends money on search, I mean truly spends money, knows the fallacy of those arguments," Weintraub says. "Not every company has a business which really [doesn't] need search. For those that do, Google is the only real alternative."

Read the whole story at JayWeintraub.com »

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