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As far as i'm concerned there is no legitimate reason. I've taken on clients that have previously had this scenario and it's absurd. The client, i.e. the ADVERTISER owns the data in that account so agencies should access a clients adwords account via an MCC, that's what an MCC is for!

In EVERY case where i've seen agencies use their own accounts, the client has received flaky reporting and had no real understanding of ROI. If an agency knows what it is doing, it should have no problem doing it properly.

Yeah...seems it's a common problem. There's a Google Partner group Google set up on G+, Lots of complaints and examples of terrible advice.

Good luck!

Google AdWords seem to be having a massive push on customer retention at the moment. We've had clients that spend 20-30K and 1K alike per month receiving calls offering "advice" (often VERY bad advice). We (and some other Google Partners) have complained to our account managers at Google and ours in particular mentioned that they have some teams calling advertisers working from prompt sheets (basically offering them all the same advice).

So take it with a pinch of salt, experiment but don't fall into the trap of thinking because it's Google they're 100% correct. Often google uses outside agencies for these types of things - one in the UK is called Capita I believe.

Frankly...the reason for the slip is irrelevant. Probably Penguin / Penguin 2.0 but you really have 2 choices:

Get rid of the paid links and start being smarter about your SEO, you'll probably lose some more traffic in the short term if you're not currently getting an algorithmic spanking from the links in question already.

Don't get rid of them and watch your traffic continue to fall as your paid links slowly get devalued.

The net result is the same. Get rid of the paid links and start again now rather than dragging it out ad having to start again later.

I usually explain to the client from the beginning:

If you want long term, sustainable results then we're your guys. Like everything that lasts long term it takes time to build foundations that last so expect to see results slowly build rather than appear overnight.

If you want overnight results and risk the rug being pulled from under your feet, then we're not your guys. We only want long term partnerships.

Tends to work well when most other SEOs are preaching the "We'll rank you number 1 in 30 days" crap.

I too follow this approach Lesley...mentioning the subject of a blog and asking for comments / or just telling them you've written about them really is a good way to get the content "out there" especially if these companies are very active and influential.

I'm curious to see how SEO's interpret this section of the Google Webmaster Guidelines on Link Schemes:

The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

(Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en)

I'm not asking what you "should" do, but rather what do YOU do... Do you interpret this as:

• Create awesome content and the links will come?
• Create Awesome Content and Outreach a bit?
• Perhaps you don't follow it all and concentrate on building links over content?

What do you do and why?

Discuss!

As far as i'm concerned there is no legitimate reason. I've taken on clients that have previously had this scenario and it's absurd. The client, i.e. the ADVERTISER owns the data in that account so agencies should access a clients adwords account via an MCC, that's what an MCC is for!

In EVERY case where i've seen agencies use their own accounts, the client has received flaky reporting and had no real understanding of ROI. If an agency knows what it is doing, it should have no problem doing it properly.

I usually explain to the client from the beginning:

If you want long term, sustainable results then we're your guys. Like everything that lasts long term it takes time to build foundations that last so expect to see results slowly build rather than appear overnight.

If you want overnight results and risk the rug being pulled from under your feet, then we're not your guys. We only want long term partnerships.

Tends to work well when most other SEOs are preaching the "We'll rank you number 1 in 30 days" crap.