Ask HN: What options, if any, do you have when Google bans you?
I have a friend who had their Google ads account banned out of nowhere. Originally for counterfeiting (which was absurd because they generate their own goods themselves) and then it got switched to "circumventing systems." Again, totally absurd since they are not computer geeks and simply have a straightforward website. They are totally at a loss and when they appealed they got a form letter that basically says that they are still in violation and thus still banned.
Yet they have no clue what they did or why they are banned. They asked me and I looked but saw nothing of any note that was problematic.
I'm curious if anyone has any idea if there is another step they can take to resolve this amicably or if they just need to accept that they are permanently banned and have no recourse or reason why.
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from what you describe (they are not tech savvy, and when you looked everything was fine), it sounds like the site was compromised at some point. It could be compromised now, but maybe only shows the hacked content (with counterfeit goods) to certain visitors (e.g. normal content when you type the address directly and hacked version when the referrer is Google search or ad). This is a common technique so that the site owner doesn't see the hack.
Which seems a bit drastic when they don't even know what they did.
It is hard to figure out what happened when everybody is "they". I don't think using "he" or "she" would do any harm here.
Alas, every submission to the "appeals" form comes back with identical, seemingly-automated responses, and my Adwords onboarding specialist has yet to receive a response internally after a month of followups
However, from what I can tell there is no human beings they can actually talk to in order to sort this out with Google support.