Are You Ready for the Next 5 Google Slaps?

Now I know you’re thinking “Oh NO! Not more Google Slaps!?!”

We’ll I can guarantee you that they’re going to keep coming. And if you’re not prepared they could really knock the wind out of your affiliate ppc campaigns-leaving you on the ground gasping for air.

I say, bring on the Google Slaps, I’m READY! And I’ll tell you how you can be ready too.

Right now the Google quality score, that determine your minimum bids looks at the following factors:

1. How targeted your ad is to your keywords
2. The “quality” of your landing page (including bounce rates)

Now be ready because future Google slaps are going to make life harder and harder for a lot of affiliates. Here’s what you can expect:

1. A much stricter, tougher landing page quality score evaluation. Google is going to keep raising the bar. Before long they’ll be taking into consideration pagerank, how often fresh content is added to your landing page, how old your domain name is, and every other factor that’s considered for SEO.
2. Stricter requirement on how targeted your keywords is to your Google ad, your already seeing this is more competitive niches.

Now I know a lot of you have found loopholes to get around Google’s quality score. For example, changing your URL every time you get slapped. That may work for a while be eventually Big-G will catch on!

So what am I doing to keep Big-G happy and my minimum bids nice and low? Here’s what I do in a nutshell:

1. Make uber-tightly targeted ad groups, put the keyword in the ad at least once. You should be doing this one anyway, right? If you’re not doing this, start doing it right away, it will lower your minimum bid. And NO, dynamic keyword insertion will NOT help your quality score, and will NOT lower your minimum bid.
2. Build an SEO site with pages targeted towards PPC. In other words do both SEO and PPC at the same time. I had a chance to speak with top super affiliate Jeremy Palmer today, and he’s now using the same strategy.

So the real question in my mind was why is Google doing this? Is this a conspiracy to take out affiliates so Google can take over their space and cash in themselves?

No, actually that’s not the case AT ALL!

Step back for a moment and envision a quality score free world, a world where as long at your CTR is above 0.5% your ads would run. A world where you can bid 0.01 and your ads would run. Sound like a dream world? A world of limitless profits?

Actually, NO AGAIN!

Here what would happen as competition increases in this zero quality score Google slap free world: more and more advertisers (read – flood of affiliates with ugly one page landing pages they throw together with frontpage) flood every possible niche and market out there, as a result the bid prices will go higher, and higher, and HIGHER.

Eventually, the bid prices will get so high that most advertiser will be squeaking by with a tiny ROI, or breaking even just acquiring a customer (NOT good for affiliates doing CPA). And forget the people still bidding 0.05, they’re on page 12.

So here’s what Google’s goal is by introducing a more and more stringent quality score: they want to keep raising the bar on the quality to make sure the user experience is high AND make sure their advertisers are always making a nice profit.

I want you to really think about this, as Google raises the bar for any given niche/keyword, more advertiser will have their ads bumped. This way Google can assure that bid prices stay low enough so that the advertiser that don’t get bumped are making good profits.

A smaller supply of advertisers means lower bid prices and more profits for advertisers that survive the Google slaps. Profitable advertiser are happy advertisers that will continue to give millions of dollars to Google!

I don’t know about you but I’m super excited about this! If you’re willing to comply with Google quality score rules, you’re just going to keep making more and more money!

And you know what, most affiliate won’t comply with Google, that’s more profit for me and YOU if you take my advise!