Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

So sick of dealing with Google, between this, the play store, admob, etc. They'll punish you for the slightest things, have zero meaningful customer service/means of recourse, and in many cases don't have a way to even reach out to customer service (admob's email option is visible but throws an error every time you click it). Not to mention, they try to steer you towards their useless "community forums" that sre filled with "diamond users" who just spam copy/paste responses.

If your business depends on their services, you're fucked if you slip up in the smallest way. Have fun trying to get ahold of anyone who can help, unless you're lucky and have a friend who works there.

Side note, they're going to further penalize apps based on performance/ANRs, yet they haven't fixed the issue of admob's banner ads causing performance issues.

It just feels awful. We need more options that can actually help small businesses, not hurt or threaten them.

Yup. Dealing with Google often gives me strong "I'm being held hostage" vibes.

Our apps have been rejected from the Play Store for bogus reasons multiple times. Sometimes it's an easy fix (aka just release the same update but with higher version number - to get another bot or human to take a look), sometimes it takes a week, sometimes we've had to pull strings and had to escalate our issue through a contact at Google. But if you're a small fish, they will absolutely let you rot.

Can agree. We are awaiting for a response on our DUNs number. They said we have to provide a DUNS number, which we have, and it has to be exactly 9 characters long. Ours is 10. Apple accepts it, Google does not. Even the DUNS lookup site only finds our company using the 10 characters number.

Google gives no response just extended the deadline until they remove our account for not providing the DUNs number.

Funny thing is that our number starts with a zero so theoretically it could be 9 characters long but the official lookup requires the 0 prefix

Call your representative and tell them you believe Google is behaving in anti-competitive, trust like behavior.

Web hosting site I worked for had way too much of its traffic from Google spidering. Vanity URLs make them hit you like a ton of bricks. If you throttle them it reduces your score. If you 429 them that seems to be even worse. Canonical URLs don’t really save you, because they have to load the response to see they’ve already visited (just saves your score not traffic), caching can help somewhat, but if your static pages meant for bots differ too much from the real page then that’s the worst offense of all. So you need internal caching and at the end of the day you just have to scale up to deal with their bullshit. Given that Google sells cloud services, this now looks like a protection racket. Would be a shame if something happened to your website…