SEO Blueprints

So we receive another email from Adwords today with another new rule. No more bidding on anything gambling related, even if it’s social gambling or just guides on how to gamble. Although I suffered a bit when internet gambling was banned originally and wanted to see it come back for affiliate reasons, I see this new addition being consistent with their policies. There’s no point in banning gambling traffic if people can just send the traffic to a “guide” with a bunch of casino links. I don’t necessarily agree with online gambling being illegal in general, but it’s not Google making the rules, but being smart to follow them with laws and lawsuits at stake. With affiliate marketing and links, permitting people to bid on the guide is the basically the same as letting online casinos or affiliates bid on gambling terms.

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

We are writing to inform you of a change to Google AdWords policy that may affect your Google AdWords account.

Google’s gambling policy dictates that advertising is not permitted for online casinos, sports books, bingo and affiliates with the primary purpose of driving traffic to online gambling sites and related content. In the coming weeks, we will expand this policy to additionally disallow ebooks that promote gambling-related content, sites where the primary purpose is ‘play for fun’ gambling, online gambling tutoring and sites where the primary purpose is gambling or casino games of skill.

We understand that this content may be promoted for legitimate purposes. Based on business considerations, however, we have chosen to no longer accept such advertisements.

When we make this change, Google will suspend all campaigns identified as being in violation of our revised policy. You have received this email because our system identified your account as potentially affected by this policy change. Please note that this addition to our policy applies to all advertisers, regardless of previous exceptions or acceptability of any campaigns.

We have thought very hard about our stance on online gambling advertising and the potential effect our policy decision could have on AdWords advertisers. However, as a business, Google must make decisions regarding the advertising that we accept. We apologise for the inconvenience this policy change may cause you.

Yours sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

**As stated in our Terms and Conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when reviewing AdWords ads created within the programme. However, this decision only concerns our
advertising and in no way affects the search results that we deliver.

Google offers broad access to content across the web without censoring results. AdWords Terms and Conditions: http://adwords.google.co.uk/select/TranslatedTermsAndConditions.html.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Adwords