Is Google that clever - Adwords non-payment penalty

[Paul B]

About 10 months ago I set up an Adwords campaign for a client's new website. After about 4 months the client's credit card, which funded the campaign, expired.

For reasons best known to he client they decided not to pay the outstanding balance on the Adwords account amounting to a few hundred dollars. Naturally the G suspended the Adwords account.

However, this site has never ranked well in G - and now after about a year since going live, I would expect to see it ranking better.

Is it possible that G is penalizing the site for non-payment of the Adwords account?

I also wonder how much G loose in this way - they didn't do anything more than suspend the account and email that fact. This means that if you have an Adwords campaign that is about to finish, you'd be better off simply cancelling your cc 30 days in advance of the campaign end...

[SemAdvance]

Hi Paul

Why would you feel the site would do better in the rankings just because its a year old??

No Google isn't going to punish a site for non-payment of Adwords...that would take another large algorithim to implement.

They will however take a sites Adsense revenues if they owe for Adwords.

Ohh and on the site ranking better...an old site is just an old site in Googles eyes..

Check the TOS

Hope this helps

[mjtaylor]

>>Why would you feel the site would do better in the rankings just because its a year old??<<

That's been *my* experience. I've been doing SEO (successfully) since 1997. It is clear from working on sites I optimize that when I work on an established domain results are much faster. On the other hand, no matter what I do with a brand spanking new domain it takes 8 months to a year to get significant recognition with Google. With a site more than 5 years old (all other elements being equal) success comes in one spidering where it would take up to a year on a new site.


Of course, all other elements are never equal so it's hard to prove this undeniably ... but it's been my experience and that of many of my peers, if forums and SEO articles are any indication.

[adacprogramming]

Same with my experience. Google latest patent seems to point in the same direction. While they apear to like fresh content, an old site means stability with a lesser chance of it being a spam site.

Back to the main subject, I doubt it would affect them much in the serps, too much effort to make them just rank lower. I would think if they were going to do anything they would just Ban the site.

Still it's not a good idea to just not pay the bill, if the client plans on staying in business, that sort of record could harm them later.

[chadhaajay]

Hello Paul,

It may be possible that google is penalizing your client's website for non payment of adwords dues. I am sure they will have some staff who takes care of non paying adwords customers and they may somehow penalize the websites manually so that they don't rank well.

Again, its just my personal opinion. Who knows whats happening inside google's work premises :)

[dburdon]

Google likes older domains, domains registered for longer, older links etc.

A 1 year old site - all other things being equal - would struggle to compete with older sites.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't think the Adwords issue had anything to do with it.

[janeth]

I agree that Google is not going to penalize a site for non-payment of an AdWords account.

While the age of the domain name does matter it takes a lot more than just an old name to rank.

[Paul B]

Thanks for all your replies.

This website was subject to six months' worth of SEO by a large and expensive SEM outfit. And at the end it's SERPs were worse than at the start! The only factor I could suggest was their non-payment of G's Adwords.

I would imagine it would be an easy matter for G to factor in 'bad debts' into their alog...

Anyway, thanks again.

[kapur]

I think google must be having system where they can list the sites which has outstanding balance on the Adwords account and based on that they can penalized the sites. Does not matter whether domain is old or new.

No one knows the fact but we can only assume.