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Comment by sjs382 | Hacker News Reader

There is no ban on hyperlinks. So while your case may be ridiculous, it's not as ridiculous as you imply.

Adwords Policy prohibits something called "low value content", which includes:

  Landing pages that are solely designed to send users elsewhere
  Examples: Bridge, doorway, gateway, or other intermediate pages

Adwords clearly (but mistakenly, I guess?) interpreted your page as a gateway page, with the sole purpose being to drive users to your Amazon listing page (on a different site, obviously).

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From the article:

The review page isn’t a landing page. It isn’t linked directly from any of any of my Google ads. To get to it the user has to: 1. click on the ad 2. click on ‘customers’ in the navigation bar 3. select ‘review’ 4. click on the Amazon.com hyperlink (there is no automatic redirect)

Also I am only linking to that page so they can read independent reviews of my product. I don’t [want] them to buy it from Amazon!

I'm not saying that I agree with their assessment. Note the last line of my comment. Emphasis added:

> Adwords clearly (but mistakenly, I guess?) interpreted your page as a gateway page, with the sole purpose being to drive users to your Amazon listing page (on a different site, obviously).

I'm just saying that your headline does a particularly bad job of characterizing the issue.

Adwords banned my site for a page that was not being advertised in Adwords.

It appears what you need to do today to be safe is have a landing page on a completely unique site, without hyperlinks going anywhere else. Or maybe, send people to Google Shopping. That's probably what this is all about.

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