This is How We Solved Google Misrepresentation Policy Bans

First off, Google is awesome. It has so many services to help us find what we need and communicate with each other. But because they are so good, everyone uses them and so it’s a necessity for a new upstart web store (like SpeedyBroz.com) to convince Google that we are a legitimate business. These are the hurdles Google puts a new web store through that we needed to fix, otherwise bad things like suspensions happen and can bring site traffic to a halt. In the end, though, we ended up with a much improved website. But we ultimately solved Google Misrepresentation suspensions and wanted to share our story with you.

TLDR: Summary of How We Solved Google Misrepresentation Ban

• New web stores will be put through the ringer to make sure we aren’t scamming/tricking our customers
• Our experience is based on a 1 month-old store using WordPress.org self-hosted and with WooCommerce plugin
• When setting up new Merchant Center account, avoid using VPN and a VoIP phone number if possible (automated flags will pop up all over the place: applies to creating new social media accounts too!)
• Make sure you’ve got all your policies (returns, refunds, shipping, privacy) posted and consistent with what you say in Merchant Center—and WooCommerce has a few bugs that can mess things up (e.g. the “free shipping” option doesn’t sync properly)
• If you can have a single domain where your email matches your website, it will make everything easier
• WooCommerce had a glitch during checkout where if a customer qualified for free shipping, they still had to select the option. So I spend a little money with a great expert Luka Paunovic to fix that and a bunch of other issues (including dramatically improving the site’s speed and responsiveness!)
• I also had a couple products posted that listed at “Clearance Sale” prices even though they hadn’t been sold already at the regular price, and this easily could have been the ultimate reason for the ban.
• Overall it is a frustrating and confusing process where Google doesn’t give details or even offer any real help, so you’ve got to figure it out on your own. And you only get THREE attempts! Thank goodness, our third attempt resulted in success!

Our First Suspension

Like many online businesses, we use WordPress with a WooCommerce (owned by Stripe) plugin to list all our products and offer them for sale. WooCommerce has a handy add-on called “Google for WooCommerce” which almost seems too easy: it will automatically share all our products with Google Shopping so our products show up on Google shopping searches. Pretty cool, right? We even signed up for a Google Ad account to spend a little money getting the word out.

Well it went along well for a few days, and then suddenly without warning Google sent an email saying our products had “limited visibility” due to “policy violations.”

Well this didn’t come as a huge surprise, since we don’t really know ANYTHING about building a website lol, but we were building it together as a family and learning along the way. “Ok, cool. Thanks for the heads up Google: just tell us what we need to fix and we’ll fix it.” But that’s where the frustration started.

“We’ll tell you when you fix it … but we won’t tell you what’s wrong!”

There are few things as frustrating as being told you need to fix something, but aren’t told what that something is. We just read this New York Times article about Uber drivers getting random suspensions without explanation and it reminds us of that (but at least we won’t get evicted if we can’t sell you our shirts for a few days). What the heck is the reason behind not telling us what’s wrong??

Anyway, so we started reading and rereading the Google policies and they are so broad. Apparently we were either selling illegal drugs to minors, or one of our links might be broken. And we have no idea where to start (except we were pretty sure we weren’t offering any illegal items for sale!)

So we emailed the help center, and they were actually very helpful (we thought). One of them suggested that the phone number on our website wasn’t in the correct “E.164” format. Which after some GOOGLING, we realized just meant it should include the country code. So we turned (516) 515-1723 into +1-516-515-1723 so their bots could properly recognize that we had our phone number on the website. OK, that wasn’t so bad. So we asked them to please re-review our site and turn it back on.

And this is the response we got a day later:

Now We Were Really Getting Frustrated

Grrrrr. So we did more research and watched a bunch of YouTube videos and started just making random changes (hopefully most of them made the site better, but we honestly don’t even remember all what we changed!) We did remove products that were “in testing” and had generic or placeholder images, because Google thinks those are no bueno.

We also found a website that looked for broken links, Dr LinkChecker, and it found two missing files that look like the Theme provider forgot to update a couple links in their CSS file (people offer free or paid templates in WordPress and we were using one we liked: Yith Proteo). So rather than edit the CSS file, we found the referred-to files and found them on some other site and uploaded them onto our site so we didn’t have any broken links. Then we asked Google to please re-review our site and crossed our fingers.

This is what we got back:

FINALLY!!! Success. Now we could focus on testing and uploading more products, especially our QB Training Net that we are so close to having ready for sale.

Our Second Suspension

Then, just two days after they lifted the first ban, we got this email and website traffic came to a halt again:

Holy cow. So frustrating. They were saying that our account was “misprepresenting” ourselves?! Yikes. That seems bad. Well, as we found out after a day of beating our head against the wall, they use this term fairly liberally. It probably should be called “maybe a possible misunderstanding.” We added a bunch more detail on our “about us” page including our legal name (Speedy Broz, LLC) and even included our EIN number and New York State filing number, to make it clear that we weren’t scammers or fraudsters. We figured that would do it, so asked Google to reconsider, and they sent this back:

The “Cooldown Period”

We were now in a “cool down” period, which honestly we probably needed. We were pretty hot at this point. Then we found this very good YouTube video by Robin Tesselaar that helped us improve the site by making these “fixes”:

• Added a shipping policy and made sure it matched what WooCommerce settings told Google we did
• Found out I had to disable the link between WooCommerce shipping and Google because it was messing up the free shipping over a certain threshold when it synced (here’s a post describing the bug) and I would hate for Google to think we were trying to perpetrate mass fraud upon our customers!
• Made sure our return and refund policy on Google matched what’s on our site (this item already had a green check confirming that probably wasn’t the issue)
• Enhanced our privacy policy to ensure it included links to all the plug-ins our site uses
• Added an additional “other policies” page that went through all the various policy setting options we had selected in WooCommerce, along with other odds and ends about who we are and what we do.
• Made sure all our products had good and accurate descriptions, which they pretty much all had already but we weren’t leaving anything to chance.

So did we get the suspension lifted?

Our cool down period ends tomorrow so we will be able to ask for a review then and will update the post once we hear back. Fingers crossed again!

Now we’ve got to figure out why Instagram banned us after two days of opening our account (smh) and wait 90 days before Pinterest will let us apply for a merchant account. It’s understandable that these sites want to protect against bots and scammers and fraudsters, but it sure does make it harder for new legitimate businesses to get started!

More bad news (April 3, 2025)

Well, the appeal was denied again. And again they sent the same form email without any additional detail or help. So the journey continues. I sent emails to both the Google Merchant Center and Google Ads support teams, and both replied with similar form letters saying they couldn’t reply because my account was suspended due to misrepresentation and was in another cool down period.

So I continue to research and tweak things. This article was a pretty good resource too. Here are some of the things I tried:

• Disabled the ability to use multiple currencies even though I only allow sales and shipping in the US. I had enabled it figuring someone in the US legally, might want to use a foreign credit card, but perhaps it could be causing confusion.
• Changed our name on Merchant Center to Speedy Broz instead of Speedy Sportz, since that’s our legal name. Even though Merchant Center says we could use our legal name or website name, who knows if this might seems inconsistent to them?
• Edited the product list to remove our internal brand names from the products, since that possibly could be seen as not really a real brand?
• Found that WooCommerce has a setting to show a “Terms & Conditions” link setting, that was set to the privacy policy twice instead of the returns policy
• Ran through the checkout process ourselves a few times and saw that on the Cart page, there’s a bug where it doesn’t automatically select free shipping for orders over $25 even though that’s the setting. And then manually selecting free shipping doesn’t seem to work: so we removed the shipping options from the cart page, and found that some of our plugins to minify the page scripts (to make it faster) were breaking the cart and checkout pages. So we made some tweaks to make sure it was showing properly. (Honestly, this was probably a big deal, we agree)
• We had a couple items that we put on clearance and listed them as sale prices (vs what we would have listed them for) even though we never sold them for full price, so we set it as regular price (this might be the cause too?)
• A bunch of other small tweaks (some may help others may hurt, because who knows?!)

Now they’ve banned the Google Ad account of non-profit we help with

We understand that Google needs to make sure our Ad account isn’t a bot and isn’t trying to trick our customers (we are sure there are tons of these around) but just now we got notice that a free Google Ad Grants account we helped set up for PST ASAP, a local charity organization, has been “deactivated for not complying with Google Ad Grants’ Website policy.” WTF? That account has been running for almost a year with no issues to help raise money and awareness for a great organization, and suddenly now it gets terminated without warning or explanation? That’s just too much of a coincidence if you ask us! Just because we linked both Ad accounts with the same Gmail account?!

So, once we sort out our SpeedySportz ad account, we will come back and start all over with a new appeal process to (hopefully) get it re-activated. Jeez.

“Contact us for support if you’re uncertain about the issue or how to proceed”

PSYCH!

We contacted both Google Ad support and Google Merchant Center support asking them to PLEASE HELP and give additional guidance on what was wrong, as described in this Google support article, and these were the responses:

Third Time’s the Charm?

After almost 10 days (14 April 2024) we finally got this email and all our products in Google Merchant Center magically returned to normal (although we had to submit a separate appeal for Google Ads, since it doesn’t automatically get reinstated):