At some point it may be necessary to add the requirement for large companies to have a both human contact point and perhaps a requirement for specifics on account terminations and the like, or at least a way to request them, to the letter of the law.
The cause was that the site was in fact compromised and at a certain URL it hosted a bunch of pages for various legit products that linked to external scam sites. They got in through some PHP hole. Got lucky they didn't do more damage. However as per various Google pages and dashboards no issues were present except being tagged as a malware distribution site.
The remedy was to audit the site, clean it up and then re-submit the appeal. Got the tag cleared in a couple hours.
So i tried appealing using another console account. After about a week i got the usual automated response stating that my previous report was auto-translated into english (i wrote it in fucking english of course) and some generic babble about what happened.
To which i replied that i have no problem opening a new account using the old email, but i'd want to know beforehand if i'd keep, or how to retain, the package IDs so it's not going to be a fucking painful mess to tell customers to reinstall.
And of course i got the same autogenerated email, with a couple new lines summarizing the first part.
I feel for the author, it is literally impossible to talk to a human there.
yes please!
Have you (anyone) actually sticked to the way of working this enables, or is this just a gimmick?
Also why use Google Ads in the first place? Given that HNers and technical users are extremely allergic to that?
Pretty sure they are not targeting the general population with this product.
That is definitely not the case. At least 90% of google results are AI slop now.
1st time: Uploaded 4 photos, local business info, current charger prices, and GPS coordinates. Google replied this would be sent to human review. It was rejected within 6 minutes.
2nd attempt: Uploaded 6 more photos, including shots of local business hours and info, and current prices. Rejected in 6 minutes.
3rd time: One photo of a new charger, no description. Rejected in 6 minutes.
4th time: Appended all above details to local business info. It went live within a minute.
5 days later: Supercharger location was added by ??? and included no info at all and the pinpoint was off by 100m.
This was made 2-3 years ago, probably worse today. Absolutely horrific experience, and they have zero motivation to fix it, because people like us still want to be on Google Maps, especially if you're not in a super good location, so people can actually find you.
(To be fair, on a laptop - I'm sure Google Maps is more straightforward on a phone. But for someone already prepared to invest this much effort, editing OSM should be well within range. And if you just enjoy contributing to maps, for a phone I can highly recommend https://streetcomplete.app.)
So what I've taken to doing is adding the business without photos (almost always accepted), and then trying to attach the photos later after that goes live (mostly works). But I agree, their process is completely broken, and I doubt they have any incentive to fix it.
Kudos for you for trying 4 times.