Welcome to the world of blackhat SEO. If someone starts driving up the price of ads for a targeted keyword, you generate a massive amount of abuse and pay people to write complaints to Google.
From Google's perspective, they look at your account and see activity that indicates you are doing terrible things.
Coupons are an extremely competitive and hostile market to be in. Not saying what happened to OP is fair or acceptable, but things aren't always as obvious looking at them from the other side.
The obvious thing to me is that a bigger part of the problem is how much effort and time it takes to get a human with authority to change the decision to look at it in many cases. If it’s even possible at all.
If one could phone an agent as easy as one could phone a sales rep, the problem would be way smaller.
If each service/account termination was signed off by a human with the authority to cancel that decision, things could improve a lot. If they’re concerned about DDoS, they could optionally require the same human involvement for account opening.
Exactly, competitors may well be the source of your problems. It's cheaper (and safer) to trash your competitors than raising your own rankings (with SEO).
When I ran a torrent tracker for TV shows I was pushing $1m+ a year through PayPal. I had my own personal account rep, etc. They didn't give a fuck about the pirated material.
My competitor though, they would email PayPal every week telling them we were selling child porn. It would take PayPal no time to lock our account while they logged into the tracker and looked around to check it was still only TV shows. We'd be out of revenue for a few days each time.
That trick is absolutely the quickest way to destroy any online business.
When I was in e-commerce, I was told a story that implied that one merchant in a niche market paid a botnet to DDoS his competitors in the tiny niche during the Christmas rush.
I have no first hand knowledge if it is true, or who the merchant was, or the botnet, it's all hearsay and rumor ... but it's the sort of rumor you have no trouble believing after working in e-commerce for a few years.
With something like coupons where you are making affiliate revenue, advertisers have it pretty well dialed in how much they can bid and still make a profit. Since they aren't selling a product directly, there is zero advantage to continue bidding if the price goes up. They are left with two options: find a new market, or push out bidders to low the competitiveness of the market.
As someone who manages both SEO and PPC campaigns I don’t think that’s true. SEO is a subset of SEM and the “blackhat tactics” that SEO’s can use against competition are dramatically different than those used in the PPC world.
From Google's perspective, they look at your account and see activity that indicates you are doing terrible things.
Coupons are an extremely competitive and hostile market to be in. Not saying what happened to OP is fair or acceptable, but things aren't always as obvious looking at them from the other side.