The Google Killing Fields

Recently the Google Adwords Monster opened the door – ever so slightly – on their thinking behind the radical culling program unleashed on marketers over the last 2 years.
If you’ve been living on planet Mars you may not know that since 2010 Google has been terminating advertisers (they’re the ones that have made Google rich)  who engage in activities that the company does not like.  In fact 2 weeks they fessed up by saying that they have shut down about 800,000 advertisers and blocked over 130 million ads from displaying on their network platform.
Apparently Google has seen it as their mission to declare war on what they call rogue advertisers.  Whilst there is no doubt that some of these marketers crossed the line, to suggest that 800,000 of them were ‘rogue’  and promoting scams is beyond belief.
Anyways, some of the general steps Google takes to detect bad ads and advertisers are as follows:
(1) They monitor ad and landing page content to detect scams, malware and such.
(2) Manual reviews of ads after being flagged by an algorithm
(3) User generated spam reports (oooh, smacks of big brother tactics.  Remember the Third Reich?)
Recently I reported that Google has now taken a step back from their previous hard line stance.  This change of approach doesn’t mean that it’s open slather for edgy marketers who delight in pushing the envelope.  On the contrary, Google is still as difficult to deal with as before, it’s just that now they are a little more realistic.
The reality is that simply because a marketer happens to be in one of their targeted ‘black’ niches (eg home biz marketers), it doesn’t necessarily mean they are scamsters.
It is to be hoped that Google’s slightly more enlightened approach will give ethical marketers a chance to prove themselves, whilst at the same time giving searchers a worthwhile selection of offerings for their chosen key term.  (Bit arrogant of Google to deny searchers that don’t ya think?)
What do you think?