Seriously slack HAM, Solar and Google Sucks.

HAM first:

I've been slack, though I've got a few FT4s under my belt lately from more obscure places like Puerto Rico. Not somewhere I've ever worked before, so that was kind of cool.

I've even thrown out a few SSTV images of late. I've also been bound to my desk over the past weekend working on some IT related stuff that feels so much like work that we'll just call it that and move on. 

Solar panels:

So, we have Solar with a Goodwe inverter. I haven't noticed anything too untoward since it was installed as far as my radio gear - but then there's enough solar in this street to have already set the bar fairly low. I've got it tied into my home automation so I can monitor it complete with pretty graphs and stuff. I'm not entirely convinced that the generation is necessarily quite right; the sun was out today, no one really doing anything, and it was averaging around 800w. On a 10kW system. If the kettle gets turned on, the generation goes up - but then this should also be feeding the grid - and that doesn't appear to be happening. So I don't know. 

That's a whole new story. 

Google sucks:

In December, I setup a "side hustle" business - effectively a drop shipping website for cool techie stuff. I kept it fairly obvious that's what it was. I just cultivated the endless sellers and repeated products down to picking the highest rated sellers of specific products with the best price and shipping times. 

It was by no means a free exercise - the integration software cost. I quickly found that I needed SSD backed servers to even get the performance somewhere near adequate once I hooked the products in.. and had to pay for Cloudflare to improve performance even further. I also paid for a custom logo and a site designer to create a template.

I registered the business name. 

I went through the painstaking process of ensuring that I did all of the Google friendly policy work - ensuring that all of the required documentation and contact details were on the website. I went through the even more painstaking process of improving the SEO of all the static pages.. and the hundreds of product pages. 

Then I started on the Google ads. 

Google ads themselves are fine; but you do pay handsomely and you can spend a lot of money to generate little. I've been down this road before...

Then it when down hill. I started on the Merchant Center integration. This is the magic bit that tells Google about your products and shows them in search results and Google shopping. If you have a retail website, you need this unless you're a really niche market with other marketing avenues. 

Again, I've been down this path before. It's a bit of a mission. It's picky about product details, matching identifiers and so on. 

Working through the integration - I told it that our market was global. It's happy to facilitate, though it gives you requirements for every single country to deal with. Painful, but OK. 

Then came the account suspension notice. A very generic notice about "mis-representation" and a link to some equally generic documentation that tells you that they think we're suss, but they don't want to tell us what to do about it. 

I spent a few days pouring through that documentation, double checking all of their requirements were being met. Then I started the "Request a Review" process. That would happen, and yet again the outcome is the same. Rinse, repeat, same outcome. Except now it was "wait a month" before doing it again. 

Then my Google ads account - linked to my Merchant Center account was now suspended as well. I literally could not give them money to advertise my website. 

I found some contact details that apparently went to humans, emailed them and asked them if they could please elaborate on what the actual problem is so that I could get about the process of running the damned website. Templated fluff that would basically say they would request another review. Said review would result in.... you guessed it.. the account suspension staying. 

I considered paying for eBay integration, but sadly that in itself is problematic territory - the same products are there, some cheaper, some with no profit potential. eBay can often take over 10% out of your sale, and that's if you haven't done any promotion work. That's a challenging place to compete when even most of the "local" sellers are just using freight forwarding from China that they're able to do quickly. In the end I didn't simply because the numbers don't add up. It's not a market that I can compete in. 

I've since tried a few times to appeal to humans at Google for some guidance, but at the end of the day, it's not worth the hassle. They simply don't care. They can afford to not have me give them my money kind of "don't care" - that's kinda hard to beat. 

Doing some research on this behaviour - I've since discovered it's a common problem - even some major retailers have run into it - and Google simply "does not care". There are consultants - charging many thousands of dollars - who assist in pouring over their clients websites looking for all of the little things that might cause Google to make those decisions in hope of getting their accounts enabled again. Ya know, because the absolute fortune charged by SEO consultants to help website owners get their website search rankings to the first page of Google isn't already a giant rort (and these guys can be tens of thousands of dollars per month). 

It's hardly worth the trouble. 25 years of running websites, and I've been defeated simply because a search engine company has decided that my legally operating business is guilty of "misrepresentation" yet isn't obligated to explain itself in anyway.  Another small business in this case would wind up in court. But.. its Google. The only rules that apply to them are their own. When they choose to apply them.