Author Archives: admin

Google Merchant Centre: Misrepresentation

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The following is a summary of my knowledge from many years as a volunteer at the Google Ads Community, answering hundreds of questions – and hearing the stories, examining the websites – regarding Misrepresentation suspension in the Merchant Centre.

This is my own opinion only, provided because Google Ads support staff will not help with this in any way, and the help files are woefully generic and lacking sufficient detail.

Contact Details

90% of cases I have seen are caused by business address issues. While the official policies only require a website to have a form of contact, the reality is that Google wants absolute trust for small or new businesses, as do shoppers.

The official policy is this (Dec 2023):

Customers need to be able to find out how to contact you on your website in at least one way. Examples include, but are not limited to, a contact us form, a link to your business profile on social media, an email address or phone number.

The reality is that you need the following on your Contact Us page, and preferably in the footer of the site as well. The Contact page must be easy to find in the top and bottom site menus.

  • Phone number
  • Email address (that uses the website domain)
  • Physical business address

The details should be the same within the Merchant Centre.

Business Address

Google wants to see the physical address of the business. That is where you (the owner) operate the business from, for example where they answer business phone calls. If that is their home, then that address needs to be used.

Many owners are reluctant to post their home address online, although such modern fears have no basis in reality, and not long ago everyone was in the phone book. Google and shoppers want trust, and without a honest address of where you working from, you might as well be on Mars. If you want to compete with bricks and mortar businesses, which have inherent trust, you need to go beyond your comfort zone.

Do not use:

  • Registered address
  • PO Box
  • Warehouse that is not your own
  • Virtual Office

The address needs to be complete, not missing a street or suite number. It should resolve on Google Maps when searched for.

Many businesses in China and India get suspended, presumably due to Google’s inability to verify the address. I do not have a solution for that.

Ideally start advertising/shipping to your own country first. It looks odd to have a UK business that only ships to the US!

Don’t use a VPN – Google might see that as a way of tricking them. Do not sign up for Merchant Centre or Google Ads if you are not in your home country.

What Google Wants to Avoid

Google doesn’t want a website to pretend they are in one country – because shoppers prefer to buy from their own land – when they fundamentally are not.

Google wants to exclude anyone who sets up an LLC or registered business, and buys a “local” phone number and virtual address, to suggest they are actually in that country.

Google seems to be quite good at spotting if you just choose some random address, although that could be more that you have the IP address from another county.

Other Possible Causes

These are the most common:

  • Copied content (aside from product details)
  • Untrue stock numbers – make sure only what is in stock and ready to ship can be added to the cart
  • Missing shipping and returns policies
  • Selling custom products. Customisable products are okay if the base product can be purchased
  • Automated currency conversion

Google Nest Ceiling Fan

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Google’s new smart ceiling fan demonstrates how Google is a leader in smart home technology, with its famous Nest range

Google Nest Ceiling-Fan

Designed by Joseph Morlote, the Nest Ceiling Fan is a natural addition to a range that already controls your climate at home, like the thermostat.

Except it is more than simply a fan you can control via an app. It is actually a smart hub with many functions:

  • omni-directional speaker
  • smart light bulb
  • microphone
  • sensors for the thermostat
  • alarm
  • smoke detector

It doesn’t have a camera because photos of the top of people’s heads isn’t very appealing.

Unusually for a hypothetical product, it comes with an image, which is the whole point – it looks great!

Google / AntiTrust

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The amount of accused wrongdoing is vast, and collectively, if proven, would suggest some sort of evil after all.

Looking through the lawsuit, the scope and shamelessness of Google’s greed would appear to be stark. Project Bernanke, for example, is claimed to take data from publishers’ ad servers to boost Google’s own services. Project NERA, to create a “not owned but operated” walled garden for users if they used any Google service. “Project Jedi” was allegedly meant to freeze out independent ad exchanges by using insider knowledge, and in “Jedi Blue”, Google is alleged to have conspired with Facebook to parcel out the goodies between themselves.

If the allegations are true, the breadth and depth and sheer focused intent of Google’s abuse of its position would be unique.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/01/google_opinion_column/

Google on AutoPilot

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According to someone called “KiwiRob”, Google is now automating the processes where they suspend Google Ads accounts. Which means when the machine learning gets is wrong, there is no way to argue.

A scary glimpse at a future where big tech trusts (cheaper) machines instead of humans, for no reason other than to make more hundreds of millions that sit in the bank.

The trend is clear. Google aims to automate ad campaigns, automate policy enforcement and remove all paid humans from support. The only staff they will need are those who conjure up ways of increasing revenue from exisiting advertisers. If you were wondering if Google removed their “don’t do evil” motto for a reason, consider this, which is just one of their tricks:

Google deliberately, by default, serves ads for your small local business to people overseas, without you electing to do so, or knowing. And the removal of the report, which perhaps increases revenue by 0.1%, is an example something that the remaining humans will think up.

https://kiwirob.medium.com/the-trillion-dollar-business-on-auto-pilot-385e6406cdef

Negative SEO Extortion is Real

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According to three commentators, emails extorting webmasters are real – pay us $1500 or we will create thousands of bad links that will trash your Google ranking.

For years Google told us that it wasn’t possible to negatively influence someone else’s ranking. Then they said, well it might be possible, so here’s a link disavow tool.

The big problem is that the extortionists can create thousands of bad links with the click of a button, but the disavow process for so many links can take many hours – and worry!

Fortunately this problem will only occur for those in the middle tier – not so small that nobody cares, and not so big that such tactics won’t harm them. Still, that’s a lot of vulnerable websites.

You can guarantee Google is working to fix this, but it remains to be seen how successful they will be.

 

Google Acquires Word Lens

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For an undisclosed sum…. and makes it available for free.

The app translates words in images and photos into your own language – a typical example is to help decipher road signs in a foreign land.

Unless Google just bought it to reduce competition, the purchase could indicate an extra dimension will be coming to its mobile search offerings. I can imagine being able to enter an image directly into the search app. This already is kinda possible with image search, where you can enter an image URL and let Google find similar images.

Future uses could include:

  • Take a photo of a restaurant sign – and Google will combine that with GPS to bring up a menu and reviews
  • Take a photo of a product (as an alternative to its barcode) and find price comparisons
  • Take a photo of a person and find their social media profiles!
  • Take a photo of a numbered letterbox or house and order a taxi (again, combining the image data with GPS

Right To Be Forgotten

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The tide is turning, and members of the public are now able to remove inaccurate search results that negatively affect them – in Europe at least.

Hundreds of people including an ex-politician seeking re-election, a paedophile and a doctor have applied to have details about them wiped from Google’s search index since a landmark ruling in Europe on Tuesday.

The deluge of claims trying to exercise the “right to be forgotten” follows a decision by Europe’s highest court, which said that in some cases the right to privacy of individuals outweighs the freedom of search engines to link to information about them although the information itself can remain on web pages.
[The Guardian]

It is really hard to see how far this will go in the future. In one direction this is just a glitch, and it will be a case of collateral damage (bad luck if a few people are affected) vs the greater efficiency.

In the other direction, people get to control how they are represented online. This might (ironically) require unique identifiers so we can distinguish between people with different names.

I certainly don’t want this, but for the sake of efficiencies I suggest that people can choose to have a unique identifier / username / handle that would be displayed alongside your regular name online. It would be a case of claiming or disclaiming online references. In doing so you risk legal action that makes the connections more definite (or not).

 

Google Helpouts: Same Fate As Google Answers?

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Many years ago Google had a Q&A service where people paid for answers to questions that were able to be researched (properly) online and offline. It provided an income of sorts for 500 researchers, and overheads were low. Yet Google decided to kill it off. If they had left it running, by now there would be an incredible body of knowledge that they could enhance their search results with.

Now we have the newly launched Google Hangouts. You pay for help and advice that you receive over video.

The categories being offered initially include art and music, computers, cooking, education and careers, fashion and beauty, fitness and nutrition, health and home and garden.

The Helpouts range from free to $240 or more. Some examples include chemistry tutoring and homework, learning to play guitar, yoga instruction, French language lessons, fixing computer problems or refrigerator repair.

“With Helpouts, you can choose who you get help from based on their qualifications, their availability, their price, their ratings and reviews,” Manber said.

“You can connect instantly or book in advance. You can get help from individuals or from brands you already know and trust, like Sephora, One Medical, Weight Watchers, Redbeacon (a Home Depot company), and Rosetta Stone.”

Given Google’s track record of giving up on products, I hope nobody invests too heavily in this…

Google Hangouts Easter Eggs

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At Google Hangouts it is easy to send someone an animated gif. Consequently Google have chucked in a few special animations, just because they can (via Mental Floss)

Typing in “/Pitchforks” in a Google Hangouts dialogue box will launch a stream of angry townspeople racing across the screen with pitchforks. “/ShyDino” will feature a green dinosaur hiding behind a small house in your chat window, while typing “/BikeShed” will also change the background color. And they didn’t forget My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic in Google Hangouts, either: Typing in “/Ponies” or “/Ponystream” will make animated ponies dash across your chat window.

40 and still a virgin

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You’ve probably noticed by now that Google Search has an auto-complete function. Start entering a search query, and Google gives you a few popular choices that will save you typing all the keywords.

You can use this to complete statements, such as “Barack Obama is…” – first choice from Google is Barack Obama is the devil. So obviously for certain searches this is being gamed. With that in mind, here’s a story from the Daily Mail about auto-completes of “I’m [age] and ”

A YouTube video posted by Marius Budin shows what words are automatically completed by Google Instant when you type the word ‘I’m’, followed by your age.

The most common phrase across all age groups was ‘I’m [age] and still a virgin’, yet ‘and pregnant’, ‘never kissed a boy/girl’, and ‘don’t have a career’ were also popular.

As I said, these can be gamed:
When Budin typed in ‘I’m 10’ the top result was ‘and pregnant’.

I think it is pretty obvious that neither is this the most common search that starts with “I’m 10”, it also isn’t the most common phrase appearing on the web. What seems to have happened is someone wrote about being 10 and pregnant at Yahoo Answers, and because of the shocking nature of it, many people linked to it. That got it to #1 for “I’m 10 and”, which results in top billing for the auto-complete.
The story is a result of people reporting on topics they don’t understand!