Counseling Business: Ads Being Flagged for Addiction Services

This is not you only, Google restricts advertising for recovery-orientated drug and alcohol addiction services. Google won't allow to run ads without certification.

 

Examples of recovery-orientated addiction services: Clinical addiction treatment providers, recovery support services like sober living environments and mutual help organisations, lead generators or referral agencies for addiction services, crisis hotlines for drug and alcohol addiction

 

To read more read "Addiction services" and how to apply for certification, please go to below link.

 

Experience has shown that that are other sections that could be "interpreted" by a machine as addiction;

You should review the whole content of the site; Otherwise, there will be no end, very time a new page will be found... and the number of appeals is limited;

What is we pointed our ads to landing pages that are subdomains of our main website but don't contain any backlinks to our main site? They would not mention addiction.

wefixbrains.com is our main site the landing page would be something like info.wefixbrains.com

Hello Jake, 

 

Using sub-domain is just a way to bypass the system & policy is in place.

Further to my reply above, Google only allows addiction services advertisers to bid on keywords relating to drug and alcohol addiction. I understand that you don't have the rehabilitation facility but you are still providing the service as counseling. You won't be able to bid for any of those keywords. 

Even if you manage to bypass the policies somehow, your ads will be restricted someday in future and Google will force you to have certification.

 

 

We aren't trying to advertise for addiction or even bid for those keywords. Our ads are about other counseling services and we are getting flagged simply because or site mentions addiction. This is why we need the SEO value of words like addiction on our page because we know we can't advertise about addiction.

So Google is saying that because our website mentions addiction we aren't allowed to run ads at all? Not even for say, marriage counseling?

Google will check the entire website for any keywords/text on website including the blog post or any other pages on the website. If you just want to advertise say, marriage counseling? then yes you can have a separate domain or sub-domain all together. 

 

But, if you try adding any other keywords in your Google ads account or running ads for any other service on main domain then Google will disapprove all ads in account. You also can not have multiple accounts for different services. All services should run from same Google ads account since its a single business/organization/entity.

 

Your initial question was for "addiction counseling services" that's why my reply was based on that particular situation.

 

 

This is not something a bot that checks the site can interpret from the content of the site;

The site should be free from any reference that implies or interpreted as addiction;

So if we made a "Marriage Counseling" landing page that was a subdomain of our main website we could point ads to it? Even if our main website still contains mention of addiction, but we are pointing all of our ads to landing pages on specific topics that are subdomains our ads can run?

  Main site is https://wefixbrains.com and the landing page the ads point to would be something like https://info.wefixbrains.com/marriagecounseling 

Yoy need an entirely new domain

Example:

  Main site is https://wefixbrains.com and the landing page the ads point to would be something like https://info.wefixbrains.com/marriagecounseling