Rep-Protect

(the following is excerpted from the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s FAQ)The following are a couple of examples from California cases; note the law may vary from state to state. Libelous (when false):

• Charging someone with being a communist (in 1959)
• Calling an attorney a “crook”
• Describing a woman as a call girl
• Accusing a minister of unethical conduct
• Accusing a father of violating the confidence of son

Not-libelous:

• Calling a political foe a “thief” and “liar” in chance encounter (because hyperbole in context)
• Calling a TV show participant a “local loser,” “chicken butt” and “big skank”
• Calling someone a “bitch” or a “son of a bitch”
• Changing product code name from “Carl Sagan” to “Butt Head Astronomer”

Since libel is considered in context, do not take these examples to be a hard and fast rule about particular phrases. Generally, the non-libelous examples are hyperbole or opinion, while the libelous statements are stating a defamatory fact.

Recently, when building the Adwords campaign for my business Rep-Protect.com I made the mistake of choosing a keyword that gave me too many impressions.

It wasn’t the impressions that were the problem, the real problem was I chose a keyword based on the type of people that would run that search, rather than what they were searching for. Google doesn’t like this, and you can’t blame them. They don’t want search results cluttered up with ad-spam for totally unrelated products. They label your keyword as “inactive for search” and assign it a huge minimum bid like $12/click compared to the 12cents/click I was previously paying.

Unfortunately this seemed to kick my Adwords campaign into scammer mode, and from then on almost every keyword I created for any of my campaigns got the same treatment, even ones that were used in the past with no problem.

The good news is that after emailing Google Adwords suppport, they offered a free campaign optimization. I’m just waiting on the results of that now.