Good morning,are you a rule-follower?

Yesterday, we had two reminders of what can happen if you cross Google and its guidelines.

Bing found that out when its Discover pages were dropped out of the Google Search index earlier this month. Google won’t comment, but Microsoft told us it didn’t make any changes to Bing Discover “that would lead to this change.” Google’s webmaster guidelines specifically mention that sites should use the robots.txt file to keep search results pages from being crawled and indexed. Bing didn’t comply with that, but Google apparently spotted the violation and took action anyway..

On the ads front, policy violations caught up with secondary event ticket seller Viagogo, which has faced legal trouble for misleading consumers with false claims about ticket scarcity and crazy-high fees. Industry groups have been calling on Google to stop profiting from Viagogo ads, and on Wednesday, the search giant confirmed it was suspending Viagogo’s Google Ads account.

Event ticket resellers are among the sectors Google is focused on policing for policy violations — along with industries such as third-party tech services, for-profit bail bonds services and others. In 2018, Google instituted a certification process for ticket resellers to be able to advertise with Google. Resellers must provide proper disclosure of pricing and fee structures on their websites to be eligible to advertise.

Read on for a Pro Tip on using observation audiences in your PPC campaigns and much more.

Ginny Marvin

Editor-In-Chief