A couple of months ago I wrote about how Google killed my online business, taking a big chunk out of my monthly revenues, but today I have good news. I have very good news! My Adwords account has been reinstated!

For those of you who didn’t read my previous article about my experience being kicked out of Adwords, let me recap for you. Basically Google suspended my Adwords account because it was violating their landing page guidelines policy. After many email exchanges, Google pretty much told me to F off and that they were done with me, banning my account. Forever.

My Life Without Adwords

For someone who makes money online, being banned from Adwords sucks. I was completely desperate for a few weeks. I had a hard time getting over it as I was trying to deal without it.

I tried MicroSoft Adcenter. The interface is awesome, but the results are very poor. While it does bring a bit of traffic, it just doesn’t compete with Adwords at all.

After a few weeks though, I realized that I didn’t really need Adwords per say. Sure, it really sucked that I couldn’t advertise my sites as much as I wanted to, but I still had my affiliates promoting my sites for me, so I was still making money.

My rough estimate is that without Adwords, I would generate about $3,000/month. Cost of traffic: $0 since it’s all affiliate driven.

With Adwords, I would generate up to $8,000/month. The downside is that I would have to pay $2,000+ in advertising cost. So basically, Adwords just brought in $6,000/month NET.

It’s clear that using Adwords generated more sales and more income but one of the “pervert effect” of using Adwords is that I have to monitor it. I have to look at my clicks, impressions, costs, and everything. This is stressful!

It is stressful on some days when you see you spent $100 in advertising and you sold products for only $50. It was stressful when this situation happened several days in a row and when I was actually losing more money than I was making.

After being banned from Adwords for a while, I didn’t stress about these numbers anymore. If the money was coming in, great. If it wasn’t, well at least I hadn’t spent any. And THAT was the good thing about being banned.

How I Got My Account Reinstated

I owe everything to Twitter. Or I guess I owe everything to how I use Twitter and the connections I made on it.

When I first found out my Adwords account was banned, I tried to figure out if I knew someone at Google. I don’t. Then I thought that maybe I knew someone who knew someone at Google. I sent a tweet asking for help and a few peeps were kind enough to tell me they would pass on my info to their “friend at Google”.

Then I remembered that the Editor for one of the top SEO blogs was following me (mind you, I’m one of the few 600 he follows). I will not give his name here because he might not want to have such requests every day.

So anyways, I DM this person and asked him kindly if he would be able to help me out since he probably knew a lot of people at Google. He replied to me saying that he would do his best to pass the information to someone. A few weeks passed and it seemed my savior had forgotten about it. Then 2 days ago, he emails me saying that he finally sent my info to his contact at Google. Great!

Two days later, I get this email from Google Adwords:

Hello Sebastien,

Thank you for your patience. I wanted to let you know that your AdWords
account and website were escalated for review as requested in your
previous emails. Per our investigation, your account was disabled for the
following Landing Page and Site Quality violation:

Customer ID: xxx-xxx-xxxx
Example URL: xxxxxxxxxxxx.com
LPQ Violation: Webmaster Guideline Violation

To learn more about Webmaster Guideline Violations, please visit
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs&answer=73762&adtype=text.

Upon re-reviewing your account, we discovered that the violation was
removed. Given this, we were able to re-enable your site
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXx and your account, Customer ID xxx-xxx-xxxx.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Sincerely,

I like the “re-reviewing” part!

Really, if I hadn’t made this connection on Twitter in the first place, I would still be banned from Adwords.

What Now?

When I got this email from Adwords this morning, I literally woke my fiancee up to let her know. She was still sleepy but I could tell that she was very happy to see me happy about it. A few minutes later, after really waking up she asked me “what are you gonna do now?”

I told her that maybe I didn’t need Adwords after all and that we’ve been doing pretty well even without it (the blog for example has been generating great money lately).

Then of course I realized that this was stupid of me to pass on an extra $3,000/month. I don’t mind having the stress of spending money in Adwords if that means I can increase my revenues by 100%.

*Sigh*. I wish I didn’t have to be so dependent on Google.

How I Found Out My Adwords Account Was Banned

On December 3rd, I noticed that I hadn’t made any sale at all on my affiliate sites. Very unusual! Last time this happened, it was because Google Adwords had put my account on hold for review (without even letting me know about it!), back in August.

I logged into Adwords and realized my account had delivered no impression, no click, nothing. Clearly there was something going on. I tried not to stress too much but I failed at it. I was (and still am) traveling in Australia with limited Internet access and emailing back and forth with Adwords’ reps didn’t sound like fun.

Besides, it was the middle of the night in the States so I simply decided to send an email to customer support and basically asked them if my account was being reviewed again, which would explain the reason why I didn’t get any click or ad impression. This is a copy of the email I sent them:

Hello.

I logged into my account on Dec 3rd and was surprised to see that none of my ads for all of my campaigns had been displayed. There is not even a single impression.

The last time this happened, it was because my account was under review. As usual when that kind of thing happens, I am bit worried. I rely intirely on Adwords for my revenues.

Would you please let me know what’s going on? Why are my campaigns not showing anything at all? Should I be worried? What are the next steps?

Please let me know as soon as possible. As I said above, I rely intirely on you and a day without ads displaying is a day without income. I’m sure you understand my concern.

Thank you in advance.

Sebastien Page

After a night spent without much sleep I got up and checked my emails on my iPhone, hoping for an answer from Adwords telling me everything was fine. Instead this is the email I received:

Hello,

Thank you for your email. Google is dedicated to providing safe, relevant
and high-quality experiences for all of our users – including visitors to
Google sites and content publishers, as well as our valued advertisers and
partners. To help us achieve this goal, we require advertisers to adhere
to our Advertising Policies and to follow our Landing Page and Site
Quality Guidelines. The AdWords system visits and evaluates advertiser
landing pages on a regular basis to ensure this compliance.  In cases
where a violation has occurred, some advertisers may first receive a
warning to correct the problem; however, in other cases where violations
have occurred frequently, or are considered egregious, Google may choose
to permanently disable the advertiser’s AdWords account.

A disabled account may no longer run existing or future ads. Account
access will still be available for the purposes of viewing historical
data; however, no ads will be allowed to run on this or associated
accounts in the future. Likewise, any new accounts opened by the disabled
account-holder will also be disabled.
Google considers inappropriate or unacceptable behavior by advertisers to
be a serious offense. To help avoid these problems, we strive to educate
our advertisers about advertising best practices, and to provide extensive
information about our policies regarding advertising policies, ad quality,
and approvals. The vast majority of our advertisers try to provide good
user experiences through the sites they promote.  However, Google will do
its best to remove from the AdWords program those advertisers who choose
to ignore our policies and guidelines and instead promote websites that
create poor, or even harmful, user experiences.

We cannot reveal our specific filtration methods for measuring site
quality or triggering account suspension. However, the unacceptable
business practices and policy violations for poor-quality landing pages
for which Google will disable AdWords accounts include (but are not
limited to):

* Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to
collect private information
* Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are
designed for the purpose of showing ads
* Affiliate sites without relevant and original content that are
designed to drive traffic to another site with a
different domain
* “Get-rich quick” sites
* Malware sites that install software on a visitor’s computer
* Poor comparison shopping or travel sites whose primary purpose is to
send users to other shopping/travel
comparison sites, rather than to provide useful content or
additional search functionality

You can find links to additional information about our advertising
policies and landing page guidelines below:
* AdWords Advertising Policies:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
* Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you’ll find answers to many
frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

Tasneem
The Google AdWords Team

Just by reading the first sentence you understand it’s a copy/paste and that the rep probably didn’t even take the time to read my full message.

I was pissed for 3 reasons:

1. Google didn’t even deem it necessary to alert me my account was being banned. I mean no email, no status update in my Adwords account, nothing. This is completely unprofessional and unacceptable. If I hadn’t inquired about it myself, I would have never found out. But what are you going to do about it? Yes right. Nothing.

2. I didn’t feel like I violated their landing page and site quality guidelines. Nothing ever told me I was in violation. Again, I never received an automatic email from Adwords telling me my sites were not in accordance with their guidelines, neither did I get a status update in my account.

3. My account had been under review just a few months prior to that and passed the review process without any problem, so why now my account is being banned, especially when I didn’t make any change at all to my account or my sites?

Talk To The Hand Google

Talking to Google is like talking to a brick wall. It probably hears you but it’s not gonna do much for you. After reading this copy/pasted email, I replied to it:

Hi,

What a shock to receive the email below from you this morning. So apparently my account has been disabled, like hundreds of others it seems.

First, I find it harsh that I had to email support and inquire about the 0 impression and 0 clicks in my account to find out that my account was disabled. Many reports receiving an email alerting them their account was being disabled but I did not get such email. Anyways, that is the least of my worries at this moment.

Over the past year or so, I spend $23,431.25 with Adwords. My ads have been reviewed several times. My account was put on hold back in August for review, and it was back up a couple days later. At the time, a Google Adwords Rep manually reviewed my sites and campaigns. Why wasn’t my account disabled then?

In your email to me, you mention that I was warned several times. I was not. I never got any warning from Google. Seeing how much I spend with you, it would have been nice to dedicate a CSR to help me figure how to improve everything.

My ads, campaigns, and keywords have always showed good quality scores (usually 7/10). So why disable my account now?

You also give a list of reasons for being banned. None of them apply to me. None!

I want to believe this is some kind of computerized mistake. Again, by reading all the forums and blogs about the matter, it has to be a mistake.

Instead of sending me a copy/paste email, would you please take a few minutes of your time and help me figure out why I was disabled. Maybe this was just a mistake. I hope this was just a mistake!

It might not mean anything to you but Google destroyed my business overnight. I make 100% of my revenues via Adwords. Yes, in other words, I’m broke.

Considering how much money I spent in the past, I would appreciate if a real person (not a computer) looked at my case and gave me a tailored answer.

Thank you in advance.

Sebastien Page

I also immediately tried to chat with an Adwords rep but for some reason it said it was impossible at the time. It seemed strange to me as it was Thursday in the States, middle of the day. Then I had the bright idea of logging out of my Google account and tried to access the chat again. Magically, it worked. This was a bad sign. Why wouldn’t Google let me chat with a rep when logged in, yet they let me get in touch with them when I am not logging in (aka when they don’t know who I am).

The chat session was very brief and useless. I told the rep that I had never had any warnings. He told me I did. I told him most of my campaigns get ads get a 7/10 quality score but he ignored me.

Two days later, I received this email from Google:

Hello Sebastien,

Thank you for your email. At Google, we consistently seek ways to better
ensure and protect the online experience for all of our users and
advertisers. At times, we may review historical as well as current account
behaviors to preserve this integrity. During a recent review of your
account history, it was determined that your past violations of AdWords
policies and disregard for landing page and site quality guidelines
warranted further action to avoid future incidents of violation that might
lead to notably negative or harmful user experiences.

Google considers inappropriate or unacceptable behavior by advertisers to

be a serious offense, and we reserve the right to to disable AdWords
accounts at any time in order to protect the quality and safety of our
users’ experiences. The decision to disable your AdWords account was not
taken lightly, and we appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

If you believe that this account disabling was unwarranted, please send me
additional information about why this is the case so that I can further
research this issue.

In the meantime, you can find links to additional information about our
advertising policies and landing page guidelines below:

* AdWords Advertising Policies:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
* Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you’ll find answers to many
frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

Tasneem
The Google AdWords Team

There was a bit of hope as her email said that “If you believe that this account disabling was unwarranted, please send me additional information about why this is the case so that I can further research this issue.” So I pleaded for my case…

Google Doesn’t Even Bother Reading My Explanations

I spent a solid hour writing the following email, which I sent at 9.01PM. Note that the names of my campaigns have been edited for privacy reasons.

Hello Tasneem,

Thank you for taking the time to reply to me and most importantly,
thank you for allowing me to give my side of the story.

I chatted with one of your colleagues a couple of days ago who told me
that the quality score of my websites were too low, especially on
the”TG” campaign.

Here is why this came as a shock to me.

1. My 3 main campaigns (TM, AC, and B) all show
a quality score of at least 5/10. In most cases, they show a quality
score of 7/10. Now the only way I can find out about my quality scores
is by going to each keyword in the campaigns and hover my mouse over
to the various keywords. From there, a little yellow window tells me
the quality score and gives me the following information:

* Keyword relevance: No problems
* Landing page quality: No problems
* Landing page load time: No problems

This is as far as I know the only way I can tell the quality score of
my campaigns. Please note that I don’t consider myself an Adwords
“guru”. As you may be able to tell, I haven’t made much changes to my
account/campaigns within the last few months.

This being said, I don’t consider that these 3 campaigns have low
quality scores, as they all show in green.

2. Back in August of 2009, just a few months ago, my account was under
review for a few days. It took me a few days to realize it was under
review and when I did figure it out, I contacted one of your
colleagues via your chat feature. Your colleague told me at the time
that it was something that most accounts are going through from time
to time and there was nothing to worry about. A few days later, I
received an email from her saying that my account was reactivated and
everything was fine. My account seemed to be in good standing at the
time.

Since August 2009, date at which Adwords Team reviewed my account and
deemed it as “in good standing”, I didn’t make much changes to my
campaigns. The most I did was just editing bids. I also didn’t change
anything at all to my websites.

3. In September or October, I contacted Adwords support for a simple
issue I had. Your colleague looked at my account and never mentioned
anything about my account being fraudulent.

Taking the 3 points above into account, it never occurred to me that
my account could be in violation of Adwords terms. To me, everything
was fine until I realized my account had been disabled a few days ago.
If anything was wrong with my account, I honestly thought that it
would have come up at some point during the review process in August,
or when I chatted with support a few months ago. Now that I am on the
spot, I also would have expected to receive some kind of email
notification or status warning letting me know about my account being
potentially against Google terms.

One part I recognize being in the wrong is with the “TG”
campaign. When I first created this campaign, it was active for a few
days or maybe weeks. It was receiving impressions and clicks. All the
sudden, it stopped working. I was getting 0 impression and 0 click for
it. After chatting with support a few days ago, I know realize that it
might be the campaign that got my account flagged and disabled.

To my defense, I really didn’t think that this was an issue at all.
The campaign was still active (I deactivated it after chatting with
support) but receiving no impressions and I was under the assumption
that the “system” (aka Adwords computers) was just seeing this
campaign as “dead”. I knew that at some point, I would want to work on
this “TG” campaign and figure out what was wrong with it,
but I was in no rush because I wasn’t aware that it could get me
banned from Google. In all honesty, I wasn’t even aware that it was
against Google’s terms to have this campaign still active.

In summary, I completely take responsibility for the “TG”
campaign mess up. Even though I was not aware that it might get me
banned, I should have disabled it. For the 3 other campaigns (TM,
B, AC), I believe these campaigns are in good
standing since they have been receiving impressions and clicks on a
daily basis.

Tasneem, I know an email can’t really translate emotions and it makes
it easy to say whatever I want, but I beg you to believe me when I say
that I didn’t know about the TG campaign. If I had known
what it could get me into for one second, I would have never taken the
chance and I would have deactivated it right away. I know that
ignoring the rules is not an excuse for breaking them, but I would be
forever grateful if you could give me a second chance. I am not a bad
man. I don’t scam people, I don’t try to steal their information, I
don’t try to install virus on their computers. I am just trying to
make a living online.

If I was guilty of violating Google’s rules, I ask for forgiveness and
pardon. As I said above, I am not an Adwords guru who tried to fool
the system. I am an honest and hard working man. I moved to the States
6 years ago and I was starting to realize my American Dream. I was
working for myself and being proud of what I did. Now this Dream is
shattered because of an innocent mistake I made and that has been
seriously changing my life for the worst since I found out about it.

Tasneem, all I am asking from you is a little compassion and trust in
me. Please take this email into consideration and let me know if you
have additional questions or comments. If you’d like to chat with me
over the phone or over the internet, please let me know as well. I am
willing to do virtually anything I can to show you that I am an honest
man.

Thank you very much for your time.

Regards,

Sebastien Page

Eleven (11) minutes later, I received this email back:

Hello Sebastien,

Thank you for your email. As mentioned in our previous email, your Google
AdWords account has been suspended due to multiple LPQ violations. We are
unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will not accept
advertisements from you in the future.

Please note that our support team is unable to help you with this issue,
and we ask that you do not contact them about this matter. If you need
more information about our content policy guidelines, please visit
https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to
terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions,
please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.

We appreciate your cooperation.

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you’ll find answers to many
frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

Tasneem
The Google AdWords Team

Assuming the CSR read my email immediately right after I sent it, there is no way in the world she could have read it all and taken the time to reply to me in just under 11 minutes. Realizing that she didn’t even read my email made me pretty angry and confirmed that once Google made a decision, there is nothing you can do about it.

The Situation As I see It

Why was my account reviewed and approved a few months back and now it’s being disabled?

Why was my account “good to go” in August but mysteriously gets banned a few months later?

Why wasn’t I alerted that my account was at risk of being banned?

Why didn’t an Adwords rep get in touch with me and tried to help me figure out what was wrong?

Many Questions. No Answers

To date, I still don’t know why my account was banned. I suppose the “TG” campaign got me in but it was never confirmed. No one at Google can point out what I did wrong.

Imagine for one second that one day the cops come to your house and take you to jail. You ask them what you did wrong to be thrown in jail and they tell you that you broke the law on many occasions. You ask them what law you could have possibly broken. They say “our law”. You beg them to tell you what you did wrong but they don’t say anything. They just tell you that you are going to jail because you broke the law and you knew about it. You tell them you have no idea what they are talking about and you never knew you were doing anything wrong. They say “too bad, we knew you were doing something wrong but we’re not going to tell you what or when”.

That’s exactly how I feel right now.

Google Is Over Reacting

I paid these guys a couple thousand dollars a month for a year and they seriously can’t help me at all? They ban me like I am a miserable spammer? They don’t even bother helping me out? I think Google just over-reacted to this. While they could have simply disabled the campaigns that were in the wrong, they chose to ban me for life. I think it is out of proportion.

The Giant With Feet Of Clay

Google can afford to ban accounts left and right without any explanation because they own the search market. Reality is they are not going to own this market forever. Maybe they will for the next 5, 10, or 20 years, but eventually it will lose its grip on people as more and more realize that Google’s old motto “Don’t Be Evil” becomes irrelevant. That’s probably why they dropped it a few months ago…

What’s Next?

I seriously have not much a plan for what’s next. I already use Miscrosoft Ad Center, which by the way is amazing (oh, and you can even talk to their CSRs on the phone!), but it doesn’t deliver much. Yahoo and Overture? Meh!

I could create another account under a different name and start over again but Google is smarter than that. They could easily figure it out and ban me again. Besides, I really don’t want to play cat and mouse with them.

Can You Help?

Do you know anyone at Google? Do you know someone at Adwords? If so maybe you can help me figure out what I did wrong. Seriously, it’s killing me!

I freaked out a bit because this ClickBank account is my main money-maker and it is really pays the bills.

The first thing that came to my mind was that maybe this website had been banned from Google. A quick Google search showed me that I was still in the index, however my Google ads were not showing.

I opened my Adwords account and realized that my ads hadn’t been showing for about 12 hours. The day before, I had read how an Internet marketer had his Adwords account banned with no explanation and no way to appeal. I started being all paranoid and thought my account had been banned for some unknown reason.

Looking into the account, I then noticed that Adwords was asking me to enter my credit card information again. Strange! I entered the info several times but it kept telling me it couldn’t be saved at this time.

That’s when all this started to look a little fishy. I tried to chat with an Adwords rep, but again, it wouldn’t let me. I then tried the Adwords help center and after a bit if digging, I found a few other people who had been in the same situation. Reading about their experience, it seemed my account was under review.

I pretty much stressed out all day and all night. The next day, while we were driving from Michigan to Illinois, I took my iPhone and tried to chat with an Adwords rep again. This time it worked and just before my 3G connection dropped, the rep told me not to worry that it was just some random account review.

It made me feel better but it still pissed the hell out of me that Google, who gets decent amounts of money from my Adwords campaigns every day, took the liberty to put my account on hold and review it without even notifying me.

The following day, I had yet another chat session with an Adwords rep and she told me the same thing: don’t worry, it’s a routine review, etc… She also told me that the Review Team had been asked to expedite my case and that she would email me before the end of the day to tell me what was going on.

Early evening, I finally received an email that confirmed that my account had been under review and that everything was back to normal.

I was really glad but I was still very upset that they never deemed necessary to notify me my account was on hold. That was almost 3 days with no Adwords and although it didn’t cost me anything, I didn’t make as many sales as I should have during these days.

It really opened my eyes on how dependent I am to Google now. In 5 seconds, they could kill all my online activity. They could drop all my blogs and websites from their index, they could shut down my email service, they could prevent me from making any money since 100% of my income is from my online ventures.

This dependence is really not healthy at all but there isn’t a whole lot I can do. I need Google to make money. Yes, I can use Bing and Yahoo, but realistically, they are not that great from an internet marketing standpoint.

Do you think you are dependent to Google? How?

How Did I Find Out There Was A Problem?

I check my Google rankings for the term “iPhone blog” on a daily basis. iPhone Download Blog (my iPhone blog) usually ranks #4. Last Monday though, it was nowhere to be found! Doing a search for “site:www.iPhonedownloadblog.com” showed me I had 27,000 pages indexed but again, the homepage was nowhere to be found. Hmm, that doesn’t smell good…

I then went and checked my Google Webmaster Tools account. It usually helps me figure out quickly if there is anything wrong with any of my sites. Usually, everything is fine. From time to time, I get a little error on one or two of my sites, which in most cases can be fixed simply by generating a new sitemap and resubmitting it to Google.

Last Monday, I completely freaked out when I realized that all my sites were showing errors! All of them! I thought it was very strange but I soon realized that my server had been down for a few minutes the day before and I figured that Google must have tried to crawl my sites at this time and was then enable to do it. I simply resubmitted all my sitemaps thinking it would do the trick.

What the Hell Happened?

As a measure of precaution, I checked Google Webmasters Tools again a few minutes later and saw that Google, once again, was giving me errors. The issue was obviously bigger than I thought. I decided to look into the problem more deeply and realized that Google was giving me a 403 error, which means:

The server is refusing the request. If you see that Googlebot received this status code when trying to crawl valid pages of your site (you can see this on the Web crawl page under Diagnostics in Google Webmaster Tools), it’s possible that your server or host is blocking Googlebot’s access.

It was clear now. DreamHost, my hosting company, had restricted Googlebots from crawling my server. I had had the same problem with DreamHost before so it was just half a surprise…

How the Hell Do You Fix This?

The first thing I did was sending a support request to DreamHost. I tried to be kind in my email but I was really furious. I think it’s very unprofessional of them to block access to my server to anyone without even notifying me. A few hours later, I didn’t have an answer yet… DreamHost is usually fast at replying, but I guess they were not that day…

So I sent them a second support request email, a little more spicy than the first one. A couple hours later I received this email:

Hello Sebastien,

I sincerely apologize for this! This was handled incorrectly, and NOT according to our own policy. It looks like a few days ago you wrote in regarding server performance. It appears part of that was actually googlebot slamming your sites. This was blocked to preserve server stability (which is normal troubleshooting), what didn’t happen, and SHOULD have, was that you were not notified and told how to deal with this. I’ve removed the block, but please see the following article:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Bots_spiders_and_crawlers

There is a way to slow down googlebot without killing your search results OR the server. This is the preferred approach. We obviously don’t want to hurt your sites.

Again, I apologize for this, and if it helps any, it looks like just an IP range was blocked, and whoever was troubleshooting the server wasn’t really *trying* to block google from your site…just an IP that was causing problems for everyone.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks!
Jeff H

Alright, fair enough… What can I do anyway? So this part of the problem was handled but I needed to tell Google everything was back up so it can start crawling my sites asap.

I resubmitted all my sitemaps again. I also wrote a few new posts on my iPhone blog in order to “prove” Google that the site was still alive and doing well. Finally, I linked to my main sites from various other websites in the hope it would help speed up the crawling process.

Googlebots came back and crawled the sites. The next day (on Tuesday), iPhone Download Blog was back in Google’s search results but it was ranking at about #35 for my keyword. I realized that even though it was back in the index, Google didn’t have a cached image of it yet. I assumed that it would come back and crawl the site again and then generate a cached image.

On Wednesday, still no cache! It was ranking slightly better though, showing up on the second page. Still far from what I was looking for, but at least it was progressing a bit.

On Wednesday night, the homepage completely disappeared from the index again. While some may worry about this, I am now used to it and I know what it means. It means that Google has crawled your site again and it is generating a cached image of it. This usually happens when you create a new page. Google will crawl it, rank it, then it will disappear from the index for a few hours, and finally it will come back for good. It’s like Google is hurrying to crawl it, but then takes its time to analyze it and make sure it’s not crap.

I went to bed that  night confident that my site would be back on the next morning when I get up. Sure enough, it is ranking again, as good as ever, this morning. Yeahhh!!! All my other sites are back too.

What’s the Moral of the Story?

Well, the moral of the story is that you should check your sites often, if not daily. You should make it a habit to check your Google Webmasters account to make sure there is no problem. If there is a problem, identify it and hurry to fix it. Google Webmaster Tools is a great help for this and if you haven’t created an account yet, I suggest you do now.

This little adventure cost me about a 40% decrease in traffic on my iPhone blog. Yes, it hurts! I haven’t measured my other sites loss as they are not as important as my iPhone blog. My money-making sites rely on PPC to drive traffic so it wasn’t a big issue for those sites.

I’m still pissed at DreamHost but you get what you pay for… I considered moving my sites to a new hosting company but it would be a nightmare. I have over 20 sites, most of them being database driven. My technical skills are just not sharp enough to do all this by myself. I guess I’ll stick with DreamHost until something really major happens.

Watch this 9 min. video by Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist to learn more about the process and finally understand what you’re paying for.

From: Stephen
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 13:25:07 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Wed, May 28 2008 2:25 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

Actually, I hit the Send button on this before I intended to.
I left Microsoft to work for Google in 2005. I stayed 10 months. I
was demoralized. I shouldn’t have ever taken that job. I was
disenchanted the whole time, and yes, like you, my regret over the
poor bargain I’d made affected my performance.

As I was saying. Google actually celebrates its hiring process, as if
its ruthless inefficiency and interminable duration were a sure proof
of thoroughness, a badge of honor. Perhaps it is thorough. But I
would be willing to wager that Microsoft’s hiring process, which takes
a fraction of the time, does not result in a lower-skilled workforce
or result in a higher rate of attrition. And let me say this: if
Larry Page is still reviewing resumes, shareholders should organize a
rebellion. That is a scandalous waste of time for someone at that
level, and the fact that it’s “quirky” is no mitigation.

I was, like you, offered a considerable pay cut to go to work at
Google. The relocation package was lame. So were the benefits. (I
had worked at Microsoft. Microsoft was self-insured, so there were no
co-pays.)

In one TGIF in Kirkland, an employee informed Eric Schmidt that
Microsoft’s benefits package was richer. He announced himself
genuinely surprised, which genuinely surprised me. Schmidt, in the
presence of witnesses, promised to bring the benefits to a par. He
consulted HR, and HR informed him that it’d cost Google 22 million a
year to do that. So he abandoned the promise and fell back on his
tired, familiar standby (”People don’t work at Google for the money.
They work at Google because they want to change the world!”). A
statement that always seemed to me a little Louis XIV coming from a
billionaire.

I still can’t recall all the moralizing postures without a shudder of
disgust.

From: Ben
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 14:43:09 -0700
Local: Wed, May 28 2008 3:43 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

Stephen wrote:
> He
> consulted HR, and HR informed him that it’d cost Google 22 million a
> year to do that. So he abandoned the promise and fell back on his
> tired, familiar standby (”People don’t work at Google for the money.
> They work at Google because they want to change the world!”). A
> statement that always seemed to me a little Louis XIV coming from a
> billionaire.

I ran into a similar irritation while at Google, actually – during that
time when the minikitchens were being stripped heavily. I heard that one
of the reasons was cost – I remember figures mentioned like “thousands
of dollars per day” – and it just didn’t jive well with me.

I mean, look at the profit numbers. Google’s net income for 2006, when I
left, was 3 billion. 22 million a year? Less than 1% of their *profit*.
“Thousands of dollars a day”? Even if it’s ten thousand, that’s still
well under 1%.

Reduce profit by 2% to make your employees much happier . . . well, I
know what I’d choose. In some ways it seemed like Google was getting
increasingly pennywise/poundfoolish, and that just seemed like a dubious
situation.

(Although, to Google’s credit, they opened up a new cafe that solved
many of my food-related issues . . . after I left. Sigh.)

-Ben

From: Ted
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 17:39:06 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Wed, May 28 2008 6:39 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

Sounds familiar (I was at Kirkland too.)
Google took longer than any company I ever worked for to get thru the
hiring process (approx 5 months from resume to job start.)

The interview process was very mixed: They had me slated as a Windows
Developer for some reason, tho everyone on my interview loop wondered
why. I flubbed my first coding pretty bad but after that it was clear
that no-one on my interview loop had enough experience or knowledge to
level me. On the other hand they figured that out and scheduled a
follow on interview with the head of the Kirkland office who asked
reasonable and pertinent questions.

Unlike the previous posters, I was happy with my salary and (for some
reason I can’t articulate) I kept my own private medical insurance…

Also I was surprised that Google seemed to be proud that they didn’t
communicate from one interviewer to the next: at Microsoft it was a
good opportunity to find more appropriate interviewers, etc. if a
person seemed misslated. Oh well, I thought my interview and hiring
process was an anomaly.

From: Laurent
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 08:10:08 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Thurs, May 29 2008 9:10 am
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

I also left Google after only 5 months.

As soon as I got inside, I had the feeling of being swallowed by a
giant borg

Really, I felt like I didn’t exist, watching people buzzing around
with laptops.

I did however meet with Larry and Sergey during a product review
meeting, and have only good things to say about these 2 guys.

Regarding compensation, I did have to negotiate quite a bit to get on
par with what I earned before.

For options however, I didn’t get much (something like 180 options and
330 gsu).

What was strange with me at Google was: while outside, I had all these
big ideas I could do if I ever worked there.

Once inside, you have 18,000 (at the time, Feb 2008) other googlers
thinking the same things.

I think it’s a good move for them to have App Engine: they won’t need
to hire that many people anymore, or buy small garage-guys because
now developers will be able to develop over the Google OS for free for
Google

One last thing: Google also thinks inside a box (the browser). I felt
this a lot, and was another reason I left. (too constrained)

It’s no surprise that they push to extend what the browser can do.
(Gears, Earth plugin)

Cheers.

From: “shuba
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 22:01:06 -0500
Local: Wed, May 28 2008 9:01 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

Hi Friends,

Yes, I do agree with Stephen about HR. I totally second the statement that
Google’s Hiring process is slack. Agreed, they receive a record number of
applications everyday, but still the feeling that the resume is lost in a
‘black hole’ when there is no reply in as long as 6 months, is terribly
disappointing. Also, the whole exit process could be bettered and ironed
out.

I understand when Eric Schmidt says, one doesn’t work for Google for the
money alone. Job with Google is sure an experience. But, yes, bringing the
perks on par with other bigwigs will bring down the attrition level to some
extent, thou we all do understand that attrition is not a big problem for
Google right now.

Keep writing!

Shuba.

From: Shelby
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 10:26:39 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Thurs, May 29 2008 11:26 am
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

I had an equally ridiculous hiring process – although mine actually
seemed normal (by Google standards) until the result. “And let me
say this: if Larry Page is still reviewing resumes, shareholders
should organize a rebellion. That is a scandalous waste of time for someone at that
level, and the fact that it’s “quirky” is no mitigation. ” – this
couldn’t be more true.

My experience actually in Aug. 2004 when I was interviewing for a
sales position in the Seattle office was the typical 13+ interviews,
including a day trip to MV where I was told that someone would take me
to lunch and instead she took me in a conf. room and interviewed me.
So I ended up not eating at all that day until I returned to the
airport at 4pm. However, I passed my interviews with flying colors
and was surprised 3 weeks later when I still hadn’t heard from my
recruiter about the results of the hiring committee meeting. Finally
he called to tell me that I was rejected because I was currently
working as a Flight Attendant. A job I had started 4 months prior
because it was a great opportunity to move into their management group
but then the airlines started downsizing management and so I applied
for the Google Travel Sales role instead. However, apparently the
elitist hiring committee members believed that FA’s are stupid and
there was no way they would be able to work at Google. Lucky for me
the recruiter agreed it was incredibly sexist and fought with HR to
bring me on as a temp. Three months later they resubmitted me to the
committee and had me remove my former job – instead I mentioned that I
was “traveling” for four months and bingo! I got hired full time. 3+
years later I was promoted twice and named a Google Luminary! Good
think Larry is such an excellent judge of character.

I have to say though, that level of bureaucracy remained pretty much
the whole time I was at Google. I finally left after a lifestyle
change moved me to Austin and they re-nigged on an offer to move me
into the Travel Vertical role for which I was promised before the
move. It’s a real bummer because I loved my co-workers and there are
a ton of great people at Google. But the management has no power to
influence change because they are micromanaged by the Execs.
I’m very happy at my new company though – making twice as much and
enjoying the benefits of a start-up culture again.

From: issara
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 08:50:45 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Fri, May 30 2008 9:50 am
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

I was hired to work in Google’s Singapore office. I found out very
quickly that Google International is not the same as Google-US. The
offered pay was way too low to survive in Singapore, so I left after I
got another job offer that I felt was better for me. I really do
believe that Google is doing some important work with humanitarian
mapping projects and digitizing libraries. But for me, I felt that
Google’s popular image did not match its actions in the work place,
and that some of the things they did were not very “Googly.”

Issara

From: “Lisa
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 15:16:20 -0700
Local: Fri, May 30 2008 4:16 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

I’m enjoying this group and this thread.

I had a far different hiring experience — it moved too
quickly! I wasn’t actually ready to leave my previous position, but
when the Google recruiter called, it would have been silly not to talk
to her.

I had one full day of MV in-person interviews, a few phone
conversations, and the next thing I know, they’re calling me to
present an offer. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have accepted it. I spent
all of 11 days working at Google before I returned to my previous (now
current company.

I wish I had asked more questions and asked to meet the team I’d be
managing (at least some of them!) before I jumped on board, but
Google’s reputation as an employer is legendary. At the time, I felt
conflicted, but then I’d think “Google wants me, and everyone knows
how hard it is to get hired there. I should jump on this opportunity.”
I don’t bear any ill will — I think Google is an amazing company, is
doing some revolutionary things, and is full of smart people. And I
bought shares in 2004, so I hope they continue to be very successful.

Cheers!

Lisa
From: Pam
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 15:39:04 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Fri, May 30 2008 4:39 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

I have been sitting back, surprised at the level of negativity
expressed by those on this thread, and wanted to share my very
different experience. Sure, Google isn’t perfect, its management isn’t
perfect, the HR department isn’t perfect, etc, but by and large they
do things better/smarter/friendlier than the vast majority of
companies out there.

My hiring process back in 2003 was, like some of yours, somewhat drawn
out, and I was made to contract for almost 4 months before being
hired, but Google gave me a chance, and I gave Google a chance. And
I’m so glad.

Forget about the cool products I worked on over the years that are on
the cutting edge of technology and impacting millions of people. We’re
mostly talking about work/life balance and job satisfaction. I get
such a kick out of thinking about the incredible stuff I got to do
while at Google (watch Barack Obama/Al Gore/Hillary Clinton/Colin
Powell/Malcolm Gladwell/Jimmy Carter speak, go to a trapeze class,
hear John Legend play in Charlie’s cafe, go to a chocolate trufflemaking
class, ski on Google’s dime year after year in Tahoe, to name
just a few), not to mention enjoy a work environment at Google that
was informal, comfortable, safe, and supportive — so different from
the work environments of my friends in other industries or at other
companies.

I wonder if post-Google bitterness is correlated to when you joined
and/or how long you were at Google. It seems that it is. Maybe it’s
the memories of Google in the first few years I was there that make it
it seem magical, but I really do treasure the time I spent at Google.
I left a few weeks ago, after almost 5 years at the company, because I
wanted to pursue a markedly different career path. Sure, I had times
when I was frustrated with the way Google was doing things, or when I
felt that my particular project, or assignment was lacking, and I
definitely had managers that I didn’t enjoy. But all in all — what a
freakin’ amazing experience!
—–
And, separately, regarding the compensation issue, it seems to me that
Google would do their research and pay market wages high enough to
attract the best. If good candidates refuse to take the jobs because
the wages aren’t high enough to live on, they’d be forced to raise
compensation.

From: “Logan
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 15:56:47 -0700
Local: Fri, May 30 2008 4:56 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

I experienced the same painful hiring process all of you did. The
reputation of Google is why I worked there for three and a half years. I
took pride in where I worked and the work I was doing. I knew I could get
paid more elsewhere but the caliber of people to my left and right was
amazing. I learned a lot and have benefited from the time I spent at
Google.

When asked by friends and family why I was leaving I came up with an
automobile analogy.

One auto has a 5 star crash safety rating, with good gas mileage, low
maintenance costs and good performance. Another, has bluetooth for your
mobile phone, 10 cup holders, sexy looking instrument panel, premium sound
system, DVD player and seat warmer but has poor gas mileage, poor
performance, bad safety rating, expensive maintenance, etc.

Some will make a purchasing decision on what really matters; safety,
performance, serviceability. Some will make a purchase based on “how many
cup holders the car has”. Google is the car with all the sexy features
but very little of what really matters. The amenities,extra-curricular(s)
and conversastion peice of “working for Google” is what keeps most
working at Google.

My $.02

From: Ted
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 16:27:35 -0700
Local: Fri, May 30 2008 5:27 pm
Subject: RE: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

My bitterness is almost entirely because of my manager. He was in my
orientation group in Mt. View and seemed like a good egg at the time. Just
as Google can be a great place for the software engineer to do great work
unencumbered, it’s also possible for a manger to be a complete jerk
unencumbered. Tho the other members of the group (that didn’t leave sooner)
thought that they could put up with anything to work at Google they did
notice my manager’s particular irrationality when dealing with me. There
were only two days of my six months there that I didn’t dread going to work.
My manager made sure that no other manager would talk to me and as soon as
the head of the office left town he tried to put me on a PIP. Life is too
short to deal with jerks so I felt I had no choice but to leave.
I do believe that I could have really enjoyed myself at the home office or
with a different manager, etc. but I wasn’t given the choice of what to work
on nor who to work for.

-Ted

From: “Greg
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 20:29:18 -0400
Local: Fri, May 30 2008 6:29 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

I wonder how much of a difference there is between
engineering/non-engineering and MV/non-MV, in addition to the
old-timer/non-old-timer split.

I started working at Google a while ago as an engineer when there was
only the Mountain View office. (If I recall correctly, the NY sales
office opened later that month.) Google certainly seemed like an
ideal place to work at the time, and if I wanted to be an engineer,
I’d probably still want to work there. But there were certainly
issues, even back then, and I believe they’ve mostly gotten worse as
the company has grown.

The hiring process:
Google’s hiring process tends to have a lot of false negatives. If I
had submitted my resume myself, rather than getting recommended by an
employee, I don’t know if I would have gotten in. My GPA was a 3.7,
and the cutoff (at least at one point in Google’s history) was 3.8 (I
went to a tough school, the 6th 4.0 GPA in its history just graduated
this year). I honestly don’t know if this cap is still there (I
suspect not) but this is just one way Google arbitrarily cut down on
the number of people interviewed.

After I had been working, I found out that I was lucky that one of the
members of my team hadn’t interviewed me. My C++ skills weren’t
really all that great, since I hadn’t used C++ in a couple of years,
and I would have totally failed if he had interviewed me. He told me
that he would have been wrong to do so, since I actually ended up
replacing him on the team and automating most of what he had been
doing by hand, so I hope that my example helped make at least one
interviewer a little more reasonable. But the old-timers certainly
felt like they had to have tough interviews, and in many cases “tough”
equated to things like trivia questions or brain teasers, neither of
which are completely relevant to what people were being interviewed
for.

The Google lifestyle:
Food at Mountain View in the early days was great. Things got a bit
crazy when Charlie was cooking in the same tiny kitchen that he had
cooked for 70 people in when there were something like 400 people
eating in the cafe, although the food quality didn’t go down nearly as
much as I would have expected it to. But this was just one of many
examples of overcrowding in the offices that happened over the years
at Google. (And honestly, keeping the cooks happy seemed like a good
idea to me…)

But along with the food came the Google lifestyle: if you were staying
for dinner, it better be because you were working afterwards. It was
frowned upon to leave right after dinner. I think a lot of people
spent quite a bit of time either just before or just after dinner
hanging out and not really being all that productive, which is nice
for the mostly 20-something crowd, but I can sympathize with the
people who have families that didn’t fit in. I had my own reasons for
not wanting to hang out at work, so I never really got that far into
the Google social scene. And my experience was that the people who
spent all their time at Google were the ones that ended up on the
sexier projects or in charge of things. (Admittedly, some of these
people were also workaholics, and I wasn’t willing to give up some of
my non-work social activities, but there seemed to be a bit of
favoritism going on as well.)

Engineers and everyone else:
Unlike most other engineers, I had a job that required me to talk to
people all over the company. I talked to the lawyers, marketing, PR,
product managers, executives, engineers… And because I started
early enough, I also knew quite a few people in sales. As far as
salary went, my offer was 35% higher than my next highest job offer,
so I think I lucked out there. That was certainly not the normal
situation, though. Over the years I talked to plenty of people about
what they thought about Google’s compensation… There’s a huge
discrepancy between engineers and non-engineers. Most of the adwords
support people I talked to complained a lot about their situation.
Not only were they generally overqualified for the jobs (given what
the work actually was, but Google has always prided itself on having
people with extra education) but they could fairly easily have gotten
higher-paying jobs elsewhere. The usual reason for sticking around
that I heard was that after a few years at Google, their resume would
look a lot better on the job market.

And that’s not counting the people who are contractors. I never
understood why all of the recruiters were contractors, given that
Google showed no signs of slowing down its hiring. All this meant was
that a lot of the recruiters had to spend a lot of time training new
recruiters, since they were replaced so frequently. (This, I think,
goes at least partway for explaining why the hiring process was
occasionally a bit slow.)

Management
My biggest pet peeve was the management, or lack thereof, at Google.
I went through many managers in my first few years. I ended up having
at least one manager during this time that was an unpopular manager,
and because of that, I was told many times over that I shouldn’t
bother trying to get a promotion. When I left, I had never been
re-slotted. This, in spite of the fact that my technical judgment was
respected enough that I occasionally delayed launches until their
logging systems were operating correctly. And in spite of the fact
that I essentially consulted to other technical groups. I could go on
about this for a while, but then I might actually sound like I was
bitter.

Remote offices
I worked in Mountain View for 3 years before moving to New York.
Around that time, I started traveling a lot: I had college alumni
activities in southern California, so I occasionally worked out of
Santa Monica, and my brother lived in Seattle, so I worked in Kirkland
a few times. The “Google experience” is substantially different
outside of Mountain View. And being outside of the Mountain View
culture bubble makes it that much harder to get taken seriously. I
honestly have no idea what it’s like to work for Google outside of the
US, but even when you’re only 3 time zones away, it’s sometimes hard
to get noticed by Mountain View.

This e-mail has gotten a lot longer than I really meant it to. But my
point is that there are plenty of good reasons people can have
negative impressions of working at Google. Just like there are plenty
of good reasons people have great experiences there.
–
Greg

From: “Lilly
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 23:36:36 -0700
Local: Sat, May 31 2008 12:36 am
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

I left to go to do a PhD. I liked the work I was doing at Googlea and, like
Pam, I treasure the time I had there, but I also left exhausted and
processing a lot of stress. I joined in June 2003 as an intern and 6 months
later, my amazing manager, Jen, made me a full-time offer without any
additional interviews. HR worked with me to make sure I could finish school
and continue working at Google. I really felt like they had my back and my
best interests in mind.

I think for me, some of the trouble was the crazy unaccountable product
strategy processes that would tell you to work on high risk things on the
one hand, but would hold you back for taking those chance on the other. I
worked on Google Page Creator from the time it was just a 20% prototype and
I also spent a lot of time believing in and doing some a lot of work to make
Google Notebook something successful. I’m not sure taking on those
high-risk, challenging projects was a good idea in the long run, but nobody
told me “hey, we don’t think this project is really worth the resources.”
I’m sort of a heart-and-soul into project person so this meant that I spent
a lot of energy trying to good work on high-risk projects I believed in, but
through the inconsistent support and wavering strategies I had no direct
control over, I felt like a lot of my energy got wasted.

There was also a big management overhaul on our team about a year before I
left and I felt like my team spent so much time trying to figure what was
coming down the pipe next, who was leaving next, etc that it wasted a lot of
energy. In user-experience design, there are a lot of smart, capable people
who have to sort of surf the waves of having a really unclear relationship
with product management.

But on the upside, I really did take advantage of 20% time. In the first two
years, I really felt rewarded and appreciated for my work and in the last
two years, I at least felt respected if not rewarded. Many days at work were
really intellectually stimulating. And despite the management / exec
culture being weird, I felt like Google’s managers are really among the top
in terms of not being corporate world pillagers.

I had decided I wanted to go grad school in my first year at Google, but it
was fun enough that I delayed going *twice* (that was a really awkward set
of deferrals).

But in the end, I was pretty tired of the constant change, the inconsistent
management, and I wasn’t sure if the kinds of people old Google hired –
wearing many hats and workng butts off to take ownership of project’s
success — is the kind of person new Google needed — people who were better
able to step in line to keep the company marching under control. I was part
of the chaos generation.

From: Luqman
Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 01:34:53 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Sun, Jun 1 2008 2:34 am
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

It looks like most of us have same story to tell….

My case resembles that of Bob ….

It took two months(lesser than others I guess) for my hiring process
to complete, and I made it clear that I had an offer from IBM in hand
which was paying me good … but I was offered the same salary as my
previous employer … which always kept me de-motivated throughout my
tenure. I joined the job due to company’s name and reputation as well
as I had the option to work in day shifts.

There was no proper mentoring for 6 months and within 9 months of my
tenure my manager was not happy with my performance, and mgmt always
stressed on “Putting some Extra Effort” – in other words “Spending
some extra hours” … this may not be the case at Google-MV but this
is what it is in India.

If you don’t put extra hours then you won’t get promoted, no promotion
means no salary hike.

I feel sad about my decision on choosing Google over IBM … Small
pay, No work, No Team spirit, No Hike in 12 months, No balance between
Family Life and work are few things which motivated my move out. I am
still jobless after 5 moths of leaving Google, but I am happy with my
decision(I feel like it is better be jobless than work for google as a
Field Tech).

Coming to the positive side, I enjoyed helping fellow googlers fixing
their PCs or Laptops and helping them with their queries. But Field
Techs have to do all the crap apart from some good work.
I like Logan’s example … good decision.

Cheers,
Luqman.

From: “Marc
Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 09:22:03 +0200
Local: Sun, Jun 1 2008 1:22 am
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

I agree with Pam. I started working for Google in 2002 in Amsterdam to set
up the Dutch and Belgium Sales office and these years were the best of my
life!

I had to wait 9 months before they hired me, but it was definately worth is.

I had only three interviews then, but number three was Omid, so I might have
been lucky back then. But waiting for 9 months was a challenge as well, but
I knew at that time that Google was something very special, so I had the
patience to wait and it was definately worth it!

I agree that the process of hiring is a pain in the behind, but i also agree
that the hiring process should be hard as Goolge should keep up the process
hiring people that are smarter than yourself. There aren’t many companies in
the world that have so many smart and ambitious people.

The challenge is to keep up the energy within the company and enterpreneurial
part and give people the opportunity to grow within the company. I do agree
that the HR process has always been tough and I do agree that that should
change. I do think too that Google is in the process of decentralising more
and providing management with more authority, also ouside of US.
But don’d forget that Google has existed only for almost 10 years with about
16,000 employees and a 20B dollar company and then you have growing pains as
well.

With these numbers and the fact that Google has a model where
you look closely at teh high performers and the quality of employees is
extremely high, you have issues where you cannot make everyone happy at the
same time. It’s a lot about numbers as well and we must admit Google is
pretty good at numbers, right?

Again, I worked for Google for 5.5 years and I had a great time growing from
a small company of like 500-600 people to 16,000 now.

Again, I agree that HR should be more decentralised and not all be approved
out of MV as the current long process of approvals from MV and little
authority from local offices causes pain and time and influences the spirit
within the company negatively.

And having worked for Google and leaving Google the right way without any
issues should be a great jump in your career as with Google the knowledge is
huge and not many other companies I know has this knowledge, so use that as
good as you can!
Marc

From: “Phil
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 12:38:10 -0700
Local: Thurs, Jun 5 2008 1:38 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Dan wrote:
> I’m somewhat tempted to reply with my own list, but I’m curious ..
> what’s going to happen with all this info? Not obviously useful if no
> one is going to do anything with it (e.g., gather and post a summary
> back to the board, bring it to someone who cares).

At this point I think that the executive committee knows that there
are people out there holding these opinions. In fact, I was at a
couple of TGIFs where Larry and Sergey addressed questions about the
hiring process and others where other execs talked about why they were
making it harder for people to switch projects even though we’d been
bragging externally that it was easy. I thought long and hard about
how to talk about that during interviews. I think that a big part of
is is that Googlers are supposed to be totally “A” players who just
always make things work out well. And there’s some truth to that: for
each of us here with a bitter story to tell there are other people who
landed in pretty much the exact same situation and ended up loving it
(and a lot more who put up with it and kept their mouths shut). So,
until it gets hard for Google to hire top talent, I don’t think the
kind of complaints that have been raised here will become a priority
at the Googleplex.

There’s still a lot of value in this conversation though, if not for
Google, then for the participants. Those of us who failed to thrive at
Google are faced with some pretty serious questions about ourselves.
Just seeing that other people ran into the same issues is a huge
relief. Google is supposed to be some kind of Nirvana, so if you can’t
be happy there how will you ever be happy? It’s supposed to be the
ultimate font of technical resources, so if you can’t be productive
there how will you ever be productive? The truth is that Google can be
a really horrible place to work if you happen to run up against its
shortcomings. Not liking it and/or not being successful there is not a
good indicator of personal competence (and if you think about it you
may realize that some Googlers are successful despite being
incompetent, so it works the other way too.) With so much positive
press about Google it is very difficult to put a negative experience
there in perspective. This thread serves to balance the picture and
gives us a, sometimes badly needed, lens through which to view our
experience at Google and re-evaluate ourselves.

I think that it’s painful for some Google alum to read these posts
when their own experiences were so positive and their sense of loyalty
to Google runs so deep. I think that it would be a mistake to become
cynical about Google. Something truly unique and magical happened
there and may still be happening for all I know. But the magic was
neither universal nor unflawed, and the Google experience left some of
us with open wounds. I was going to say that it would be Googly to be
respectful of that, but to be honest, Google culture just isn’t that
mature. Not yet anyway. Nevertheless, the most positive thing for
those of us who are interested in this thread to do is to understand
and respect the experiences described here. Doing so will, in a small
way, strengthen our own careers as well as those of the people around
us. And eventually some little bit of the learning we do here will
inevitably seep back into Google and do some good after all.

From: Aaron
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:48:41 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Thurs, Jun 12 2008 2:48 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

My previous employer was sinking fast, and Google seemed like a good
opportunity to get out.

First, I was really disappointed with the salary that Google offered.
During negotiations, they accommodated me a little, but not much. I
was barely making more than I had been in the midwest, and the
difference in CA state taxes wiped out almost all of that. Then
there’s rent. My wife and I don’t have any debt, we pay cash for our
cars, we live in a modest apartment, we only have one small child, and
we don’t travel or live a luxurious lifestyle. Yet we were already
dipping into savings during the second month just to pay the bills.
Part of it was certainly my fault; I shouldn’t have accepted such a
low offer.

The relocation and hiring bonus’ stated values were pre-tax! That was
a huge unexpected blow to the pocketbook. It may sound strange to
some, but Google’s the only company that has ever done that to me.
Again, that’s mostly my fault; I made a naive assumption.

The relocation company told us it would take 8-12 days to get our
stuff. It took 14 days. We managed as best we could for almost 2
weeks with a 1-month-old baby in an apartment with no furniture, no
extra clothes, and a rental car. Google should have taken more
responsibility and initiative on this, but they stood very much
aloof. Their only other option was the corporate housing option (move
twice!). If I had known it would be this bad, I would have rented my
own truck for 1/3 of what Google paid the moving company. I can drive
from Indiana in 3 days; I’ve done it many times.

Anyway, Google should know that good engineers are in high demand.
They get their market value, especially in the Bay Area. So after
only 3 months at Google, I was aggressively recruited by another
company that offered 2x my base salary (which has been increased
repeatedly since then). The company also wanted to hire me to do what
I am most skilled at doing, and I could never say that about Google.
I took the job. I get invitations to interview at companies regularly
(Apple contacted me most recently) but I turn them down every time. I
like what I’m doing, I believe I’m well-paid, and we just released a
very successful product.

There are nice things about Google. I met some intelligent and good
people that will be lifelong friends. I got to see Ron Paul speak,
and I have many fond memories. The bureaucracy and authoritarian
“gods of coding rules and regulations” were crippling for an
experienced developer, but are probably just the right thing for
someone green out of college. To me, the food wasn’t that big of a
deal. It was good, but I’m not much of an eater. However, I was
really disappointed when the hot chocolate started disappearing from
the mini-kitchens. I hope that 20 cents a day was worth it to them!
As a full-time employee I prefer a good salary to graduallyevaporating
fringe benefits and arbitrarily-sized bonuses. I started
out in the dot-com boom, and I’ve seen those empty promises go
unfulfilled time and time again.

I’m not bitter anymore; just disappointed that Google didn’t come
close to what I thought it would be.

From: Juliette
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 10:54:42 -0700
Local: Fri, Aug 1 2008 11:54 am
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

Google was my first job out of college. I was an English major at a
prestigious college and was hired to work in HR. That is one of the problems
I had with Google right there – is it really necessary to hire Ivy League
graduates to process paperwork? I went from reading Derrida to processing
“Status Change Request Forms” for X employees to go on paid leave. The term
“Status Change Request Form” will forever haunt me.

The company is – unquestionably – an amazing business model. Despite the
gripes some people may have at Google, employees are Google are coddled much
more than at most other companies. I left after working at Google about six
months (left without even thinking of a bonus) because my abilities were
entirely underutilized and, of the three managers to whom I was assigned,
two were complete nightmares. One was about six feet tall, and I secretly
referred to her as Medusa or Medea, depending on my mood. But that is
neither here nor there. Another reason I left was because I felt overmanaged
in every conceivable way. I shared, for a large part of my experience, the
same office as said manager of mythological Greek she-monsters.

I really have no hard feelings toward the firm. When I tell people I worked
at Google, most people are incredulous that I would have left after such a
short time. I want to make this response as objective and as helpful as
possible, so I have three suggestions for the firm in how to prevent cases
like mine from happening.

1) Avoid hiring creative writing/art/film production majors into highly
structured and highly interpersonal roles like HR. I spent most of my
college life writing short stories – alone. Perhaps not the best indication
that I care or even know how to be productive in a role that requires
constant client-facing time. My manager used to always pride herself on
being excellent at “customer service,” which she often said was her favorite
aspect of HR. Service ANYTHING gives me the chills, as it does – I am sure -
for most highly left-brain types.

2) There is Google quirky, and there is too weird to ever fit into a
corporate mold. Identify.

3) Make it easier for people to switch managers if the fit is egregious

4) Give a more accurate representation of Google to potential employees
BEFORE you hire them. All I knew before starting at Google was “#1 Place to
Work According to Forbes” and “Free Gourmet Food” and “Unlimited Sick Days”
and “We Want You to Be Googley!” Like, properly, echoing in my brain. My
twenty-two year old greedy magpie self was wholly drawn in by the idea of
having sashimi anytime I wanted without paying a dime. But as nice as it is
having a cushy 401K and unlimited sick days, I was not willing to sacrifice
my personal happiness and career fulfillment, not even for all the free
kombucha I could drink.

In short – I left for personal reasons listed above. Now is the time for my
shameless self-plug. After bumming it around for 5 months doing odd jobs
(like, properly odd… I did stints in PR, dog walking, babysitting,
modeling) I finally landed the job I’d always dreamed of, which is to write
for a living.

I now run my own fashion blog and host an online fashion “web show” at
< …> If anyone out there is interested in fashion,
even as a passing thing, it might be of some interest.

-Juliette

From: Scott
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 12:37:03 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Mon, Oct 6 2008 1:37 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.

Hi there,
Well I left Google three months ago so the scars are still fresh! I
worked in sales and a bit of sales management (will explain) in London
between 2004 – 2008.

I think with all these things, its the little bricks that make the
house. I have yet to find a perfect job, so I was pretty bummed when I
was pitched one when I joined.

Here is my two penneth
Management – I strongly believe there were a lot of people who did
very little in the way of people management. Due to the aggressive
growth of Google, a lot of managers essentially learnt nothing about
the products or issues with staff. Instead they ‘managed up’ covering
their own patch or careers. I averaged consistent high OKR scores
(despite the managing of the curve nonsense that creates more
subjectivity than objectivity) and despite having 5 managers in 3
years (all of whom knew nothing about my vertical) I watched newer
employees join talk utter rubbish, speak in non sensical management
talk, piss off agencies/clients (I know because they used to call me
laughing) and get promoted.

Mostly because they loved doing business in a suit, if you were not
wearing a suit and did a lot of brown nosing you were screwed. I did
neither…hehehe – Maybe that has something to do with a change of
culture. If that is the case then the rules to be Googley should
change. It sometimes felt like the rules to being Googlgey were a PR
strategy.

Culturally – In London I just felt the soul of the place change. A lot
of people I worked with or knew there were deeply unhappy with the
lack of fun (Still are , but they won’t talk to management because
they know it is not important- see above). It all seemed to be
contrived and a little false. Of course nothing stays the same but you
when working with a team where politics, egos and bullshit didn’t
exist and suddenly it did, you can’t help but feel confused.
You read so much about how amazing it is to work at Google and for the
first two years it was. I was empowered, promoted, treated with
respect and honesty. Before I left it just was a place full of quiet
moans, talented people being undermined and a structure that created
hostility and politics.

I loved my time there. It was a real education. Not to mention my very
risque TGIF routines in London. Actually I think that maybe while I
was ignored. I was not going to compromise my personality by dressing
like a business consultant. I was serious at my job without wearing my
suit.

The food was amazing though.

Actually I have just read this back and it now appears I should of
left years ago. Whatever – Google you have some amazing people there -
start listening and responding. Wisdom of crowds….cough….splutter

OMG what did I just say? Why in the world would you hate Google? Google is so awesomely uber amazing. I mean, without Google, you’d still be using Yahoo for your searches; you’d still be using Hotmail for your emails; and you’d still be using MapQuest to get directions. Isn’t Google a life saver?

The fact is that Google is not a life saver. Google is a life creeper! Google is reducing your vision field and the worst thing is that you don’t even notice anything, and you’re probably asking for more.

A look at Google products and future products is scary. Mail, blogs, search, browser, health, advertising, video, books, maps, images, office tools, and so much more… Tell me one thing Google doesn’t do and chances are they’re already working on it.

What really scares me in the trust people put in Google. Their moto “don’t be evil” has been obsolete for quite a while – in case you didn’t know, Google gave away info about dissidents to the Chinese government. For a company that aims at not being evil, that’s a miss…

My prediction is that in less than 5 years we will see associations of people against Google. Remember how MicroSoft was hated by everyone in the 90’s? I predict it’s going to be much more than that. I also predict that sooner rather than later there will be a financial scandal shaking the market’s trust in Google.

You must think that I am crazy and that I have nothing to support what I am saying. You’re right. I am crazy and I have no evidence but please remember me in a few years when you blog about how much you hate Google…

Below is a snipet of an interview that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave in January 1999 to Karsten Lemm, a correspondent for the German newsmagazine Stern. The full interview can be found here.

Do you generate any revenue at the moment?

Sergey: You caught us at an interesting time. Right now, we’re thinking about generating some revenue. We have a number of ways to doing that. One thing is we can put up some advertising. The key there is to put up advertising that will be really useful to our users and not slow down our site. That way we won’t push people away from our site, but we’ll still take in some revenue. Another way would be co-branding. Provide the back-end search engine to other sites.

How do you see Google develop? At some point, do you see yourselves on par with AltaVista, Excite, all these other established search engines?

Sergey: I would say no. We want to be on par with Yahoo, or Amazon, AOL. AltaVista, Excite and [the others] are by no means viewed as the winners. There’s no question, we want to be number one in market share in terms of search. And I think we can do that in not so long. Past that, it’s really hard to predict. There’s really no reason to set our sights low. If you do things right you can make a big jump over everybody else.

Boy, these guys were right on! As much as I hate Google, I have to admit the business model is impeccable!

The password-protected service provides a personalized profile for Google users of their basic medical history and gathers relevant information associated with the user’s health conditions.

One feature includes a link to help users find doctors by location or specialization. The “virtual pillbox” notifies patients when they need to take medications and possible drug interactions between different drugs. Users can also import medical records if they are available in digital form.