Microsoft AdCenter: My life as an International Arms Dealer
I recently ran afowl of the Microsoft’s robotic crawler for their AdCenter. I had search phrases that had been in the system for almost a year suddenly rejected. Here’s the sequence of events
- I added a single new term to my client’s account
- Their robot went out and scanned the landing page
- My newly added phrase was rejected for “Website contains prohibited content“
- I scratched my head, wondered if I had somehow input the target url with a typo leading to a porn site, tested the target url, all was fine
- Called AdCenter Support. Not a bad experience - no endless IVR system, got to a real person quickly who was friendly and efficient. He told me my phrase looked ok and he would appeal it form me and call me the next day.
- The next day, the newly added phrase is now activated but all of previously accepted phrases are now rejected for “Website contains prohibited content“
Well I again called support and the agent this time told me what was happening. The landing page contained some images with a filename of “bullets” that I had inherited from the original designer. At some point, I had added in alt text so the page would validate. Not being very creative, I used “bullets” also as the alt text. The code looked like
Ok, not the greatest bit of HTML coding but pretty basic.
Apparently, since I had the word “bullets” in my code the AdCenter crawler decided I was some type of arms dealer which violates their site policy. This came about even though nowhere on the page, in the title tag, or in the metatags was there any term associated with weapons.
While I am not sure I agree or disagree with their policies, this is just bad customer service. Why does failing their crawler in a non-obvious case reject previously approved phrases? Shouldn’t this automatically go to a human editor first? This penny-pinching procedure ends up costing Microsoft more money. My terms are offline for awhile not generating clicks, and they have to spend a bunch of expensive customer service time on the phone with me. Even when the problem will get resolved, I will be left with another bad feeling about AdCenter.
I asked the customer support agent what will happen if I add more phrases to my account. She told me that they will likely re-classify my customer’s site as inapprorpriate and reject all my keywords, but no to worry we can always go through the appeal process again.
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