Hi, i usually use the link that is offered by the affiliate network, without redirect.
For months I had no problems, but lately it does not work anymore, says "Not approved: Malicious or unwanted software
ad not approved on google ads "
I do not understand why google detects malware on the site, has it ever happened to you? Google Help sent me the infected links
according to them, I should "Clean" these links are usually photos. But of course I can not do it because it is not my property.
What would you do to sponsor affiliate links on adwords?
You should probably use a landing page in the middle. google is not a fan of redirects anyway, so I'm surprised you even had the affiliate one running for months
Google did this to me a few months ago on a WP site I was running on diet. If you're running it, good chance that account is RIP in the next month or two.
I also got hit with the "Not approved: Malicious or unwanted software" on a white hat campaign, all traffic was going directly to my site, which is not software related at all. I emailed them, hopefully I will get a response, the account is still active.
If you are using wordpress on your safepages, check your website for malware: https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/. I've got hit with the same thing, and there actually was a malware in my wordpress.
I literally just dealt with a freeze on my account for malware. Also white-hat, about a year old. Marky, if your experience was anything like mine, you will get the freeze on your account pulled after they verify the malware is gone with their malware scanner. It did take ~3-4 days after the malware was gone before their scan showed it clean though; they kept giving me a URL that was supposedly infected but that I knew as already clean and I kept asking the rep to point me to the exact line(s) of code that were problematic.
By any chance, do you spoof the HTTP referrer (through a tracking template) or do you just send traffic straight to your LP? As soon as I tried spoofing the HTTP referer using a meta refresh through a fake LP (I'm direct linking to merchant), my account got frozen for this malware nonsense. Coincidentally, my site truly was infected around this time, so it may just be a coincidence.
BUMPing this thread. I now have this problem as well but it's really very very strange, I'm not sure how much of the flagging is automated and how much is manual.
Anyways - I had some campaigns in Adwords, they were flagged as Malicious or unwanted software. So I contacted them and asked what's wrong.
1) First time contacted them - they said it's because of HTTP resources and that all resources should be HTTPS (I see http sites in Adwords quite often)... It stayed banned.
2) Second time contacted them - they said it's because of some links which were my retargeting pixels. Okay, I removed that and asked for reapproval. Still banned
3) Third time I just decided to add a brand new campaign with a completely random 100% whitehat site selling car tires that does NOT belong to me and I have no relation to it whatsoever, wait for it!!! This site was also banned for Malicious or unwanted software even though it was just a dumb site of some guy selling tires!
4) Fourth time I asked what's wrong with the tire site, they replied that another team is researching it and after maybe 3 days they replied that it's unbanned
5) A week passes and the tire site got banned again.
I couldn't care less about some whitehat tire site (though I may have gotten the site banned for no reason, the owner may be surprised if he wants to run ads...). What I care about is that my ads are still banned and even when I'm not doing any cloaking or redirects right now, they are still flagging it. It's ridiculous because there's NOTHING malicious on the site, it's just whitehat safepages. I feel like my account is just marked (though still active) and they refuse to tell me any details.