Well, it really was all fine for a while. A fresh account, method of payment setup, ads created and working for a couple of weeks. Then, the person whose name was on the account, received a CALL from Microsoft, asking to call back. She didn't know too much about it, and just called back worried. She was greeted with BS offering some free mumbo-jumbo (like, free $100 worth of their help with keyword targeting or something - like anyone would ever WANT their help with that!). She heard the word "free" and thought "sure, ok", well, that was a grave mistake. Apparently, it made someone there actually look at our site, and - lo and behold - it was "disapproved" within hours. Nothing has helped ever since.

I don't know if it was just a coincidence, with them cracking down on all advertizers, but it sure feels like this stupid call had at least something to do with it. We spoke with their support, argued, created another account, only to be disapproved again, and put through countless rounds of BS before we are deemed "compliant". It appears nothing would please them at this point, not even the fact that they had been paid 1000's in ads over the last couple of years in another account that they also "disapproved" along (apparently cause it was associated with the same physical address), which is lost revenue for them! Really have no idea how to rectify it now.

Wow, that sucks.

Hopefully you can get a new account up and running.

Try setting up a P.O. box and having that as your address. And make sure to get a new bank account for the adcenter account. You may still run into problems because they most likely put your domain on a watch list.


Hopefully everything works out for you

Hi, yeah, unfortunately, we really tried to do it "right", with the account and payment method being "company" and not just personal.

I am pretty sure that one domain is lost as far as Adcenter goes. Hence me turning to this whole black hat scene. I am optimistic, and sure have the time for this being without a job

We pretty much decided to start with adcenter from scratch with a new domain and go all organic with the one they banned. I wonder however how far their cross-checkign may go - anyone have any idea? As in, I am pretty positive they banned my friend's site based on the same address/name and whatnot, and that trying to revive this domain with them would only mean more trouble, but do they record and cross-check IP, card number (I assume they do), etc? In short, starting from scratch, how much of needs to be completely virgin? Any insight/experience? Thanks!

Hmm... interesting scenario.

When you contacted support about the issue, what did they say was the exact problem? Is your entire account on hold now?

I don't think your domain is blacklisted yet, but I can't be sure.

Please post more details about what exactly happened, what you did to try and fix it, what they told you, etc and I'll see if I can help you out of this.

Well, my understanding is it was about having ads on the site.. which makes it a moot point for us - no ads means no revenue, then why the heck would we wanna pay M$?
Quoting their email (one out of several):

Dear adCenter customer,
Thank you for submitting your recent adCenter ad groups for the following account:

Account number: ........

As part of the editorial review process, we have reviewed your ads and keywords. Unfortunately, we were unable to approve some of them.
To view and update your disapproved ads and keywords and then resubmit them for review, do the following: blah blah, following the instructions gives the following reason for every single one of our ads:


"The ad does not meet Microsoft adCenter editorial guidelines."

It was the other person whose name was on the acct who actually spoke to them, but the gist of it was "you need to change your site before it complies with our policy". Endgame.

I do not think the entire account is "on hold" but several attempts at creating new campaigns all resulted in instant disapproval. Worse yet, after all this ensued, they did the same to that guy's personal acct (same last name/address I assume) and killed his ads he'd been using for years.

If their email is any true, then they are now looking into each and every ad that's being posted (really?), and it is unclear whether he'd continue staying under the radar if this didn't happen, or if they'd find him regardless.

But what strikes me most is - we are paying customers for god's sake, so what if we have ads on our site, c'mon! Also, if they are actually checking, AND don't want any ads, then there's no sense for me to try and sign up with my name/info, since it'll get banned anyway. I also logged in a couple times, wonder if they got my IP now.. not that it's too big an issue, but wonder if they check on that too.

wow , thats interesting and a sort of funny though man , keep us informed what happens...lolz

msn support is useless.

if your adcenter account is banned, you're better off
creating a new account. can't afford to lose $1000s in revenue
while waiting 5 days for a reply from the (equally useless) billing department.

or go back to adwords. they are also a pain, but if both are
aXXholes, better to focus your time on adwords where traffic
is VOLUMOUS.