Still happening here… Google paid ads are still working fine and my page rank is still great, its just the free shopping ads that are not showing.! Its so frustrating.
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Still happening for me. Googe ads not affected, product showing as active for free listings in merchant centre however not actually appearing in any google shopping pages.
still happening … anyone shed some lights?
This started happening to us on 6/15, any resolution from anyone?
Did anyone try creating new feeds with new IDs?
yes, it didn’t work. The block is tied to the google merchant account. Nothing you change will revert the problem. I deleted the account and created a new one and products disappeared again after a few days. So something algorithmic likely triggers this. Once it’s triggered there is no way to revert it. Honestly tired of paying for Google ads for sales that have neutral ROI at best. So yes Google go ahead and ban us, little to lose here anyway. Your ads are not profitable anyway. You can only profit if your customers are repeat customers. Glad to hear that the DOJ is suing Google for monopolistic behavior. Google is effectively pocketing the bulk of retail profits, crushes small businesses and the list goes on.
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So glad to find this thread and finally prove I am not crazy and that Google support has been gaslighting all of us this whole time. I am also shadowbanned by Google with zero organic shopping impressions since May 20, after many months over 400 impressions per day on 1500 products. I have tried disconnecting the shopify feed and manually uploading a product list to control all the factors and make sure everything was perfect, but it didn’t help. It is interesting that recreating the Google Merchant Center corrected this for a few days for you. I am very keen to try that and had already been considering it, was just looking for less drastic ways to “reset” the algorithm but they didn’t work. I have made a lot of changes that could conceivably help - for example I figured out how to get rid of urls that were mismatched to the products. Maybe we won’t get shadowbanned by Google again after the recreate, hopefully the algorithm will reevaluate and find us worthy this time. I think a “reset” is the only way since the passage of time doesn’t seem to trigger a reevaluation. Can more people give this a try and report how recreating your account helps/doesn’t help?
I asked Google support the same thing, they say I am not banned and yet every single one of my products has zero impressions and it never changes. There is a severe lack of transparency from Google here - if they are enforcing a set of trust parameters that prevent free listings, they should expose your site’s trust score. Google needs to share a set of meaningful steps to raise your trust score, the frequency of algorithm reevaluations, and the results of each evaluation. They certainly shouldn’t show you “eligible” for free listings because that is just infuriating since we all know that is hogwash based on our results. They are leaning way too far into the “hey this is a free service so you can’t complain” since some of us absolutely refuse to spend more money on enhanced listings when the basic organic listings are ripped away with no explanation. I would rather spend ad money with Meta, Bing or DuckDuckGo if Google can’t fix this.
I was thinking we could keep creating feeds with new ids to get the reset and jump start free listing impressions, test various fixes (because there is always something we can improve), and then see which fixes actually cause free listings to continue working again permanently and which fixes don’t seem to make a difference. Then we can try to find out if the fixes might work even without recreating the GMC account.
tried creating new ids, new feed, also tested clearing up the feed and adding a product manually. Nothing like that worked. Google just marked our Google Merchant accounts as toxic and you cannot change anything to revert the problem. It may very well be a bug on their end, but I am sure they have heard complaints by now so it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. What remains unclear is what trigger this. There are plenty of competitor stores that are still visible despite poor authority score and organic traffic. Or maybe Google is just treating us as guinea pigs to see if now that free listing are gone we increase our ad budget. Very possible actually. This sounds like the most likely reason…
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What about gaining the trusted quality store badge? It says that helps with boosting your results, so maybe that would trigger the correction of this issue.
Another thought, has anyone tried free local listings to see if that gets any impressions since free listings is not working? I applied for it but it went into limbo and never got approved. I am wondering if it might be worthwhile to pursue that as a roundabout way of kickstarting organic impressions again.
We have the same issue – on products our competitors offer, some of them have the Trusted Store badge, some of them do not.
I did and it didn’t help. Back in the days we had both free listings and free local listings. When things went wrong I was playing with all possible combinations switching things on and off. Now with free local listings back they do work but i turned them off again as they add to the same organic search results as free listings.
Oh man! This thread has cured me. I was going crazy! And we’re not even using Shopify, we’re using a completely different system. Yet, we’re experiencing the exact same problem.
Facts:
We’ve been with Google / Ads / Merchant etc. for several years.
There was never an account suspension or anything similar.
Since May 6, 2023, we suddenly have 0 impressions for free listings.
Our paid shopping ads are displayed without any problems.
Even when I search for products that only we offer, or even directly with our brand/shop name in the Google Shopping tab, nothing from us appears. Completely irrelevant and other things come up, but not us.
I’ve been driven crazy and have exchanged 1000 emails with Google Merchant Support but never received a solution. I was only ever referred to standard articles on the web etc.
Quick question so I can also rule this out: Have you also received this “crypto certification” in your Ads accounts? We have nothing to do with crypto, but we constantly get this message. I had the suspicion that it could somehow be related, but if this is not the case with you, I can also rule that out.
I do not use that unfortunately so hard to say that’s what caused it.
Another person thought it was an error with return policy so I reset all
that and got reverified which also did not fix the problem.
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No, not getting any messages about crypto so I don’t think it is related. I have a bunch of theories though. I recreated my GMC account yesterday and made a ton of feed improvements and site improvements, and am pending initial verification and then we will see how long my products show impressions and whether I end up getting shadowbanned again.
Still the same here! I’ve tried everything including resetting the returns policies etc but alas, my free ads are still hidden.
i’ve given up now! It’s just so frustrating
Wait…i dont know if i got that right.
So you created a new GMC Account and with that new account you again get those free impressions?
Mine was kind of the opposite - our account was suspended, and our free listings were still working. Then, our account got unsuspended on May 20, and after that we never had any free listing impressions ever again.