Did You Survive the Latest Google Slap?
July 11th, 2008 by 
Amit
You may have heard, or hopefully not experienced, the Google Slap this week! Looks like Big-G is planning on quarterly slaps.
I was basically unaffected, as usual-my strategy of building authority sites seems to be working. In some of my campaigns I saw my min bids inch up a little bit, but that’s typical.
In some of my other campaigns I saw my traffic increase and my CPC drop! I know for a fact in those niches that there were a number of affiliates running one page landing pages. I can imagine that all those affiliates got whipped out. Less competition means more traffic and a lower CPC, at least until these affiliates get up and running again.
What I can’t understand is why anyone would run a one page landing page for more than a week or two? If you know your offers is a winner after testing it, INVEST INTO BUILDING A REAL SITE.
Sure you can re-upload your campaigns or change your domain and get things running again. However, you’ll have to do that every 3 months (remember quarterly Google slaps). Every time your campaign gets slapped you lose history and the guy who took the time to build a real site gains on you.
Don’t bet a quick fixes working in the long run either, Google will eventually come up with a way to slap your site so fast it won’t be worth even running a one page site just to test an offer.
Google Quality Score Update google slap
Posted in Google™ AdWords | 
Interesting….
My campaigns are still at great. Maybe this will allow me to get ahead of some of the other sites.
Amit,
Do you think when they do a Google slap they reset your account back to like its brand new again? You know what I mean?
You’re right Amit, it sure looks like we can expect slaps every 2 or three months. It’s good to see your sites are still standing
All of our mini site campaigns are running as well, however one of our students direct/whitelabel campaign got slapped, which is a bit confusing..
Everything seems to point in the direction of the manual reviews.
I just want to point out to people that you can put up as many content as you want: as long as your Adwords Landing Page is still simply linking to Affiliate Partners, you will get slapped. It doesn’t matter if you mask or cloak your link. Just don’t link directly: use whatever creative means you have to get around that..
Survived it!
After the previous slap I moved a higher concentration of my KWs above the fold, added a few pages of content and I added blogs, to which I add content to at least twice a week.
Not a lot of new pages, just 5 or 6 pages.
In your opinion is a 6 to 10 page site enough?
Does a Blog help?
Thank you Amit for this opportunity to interact with a real Pro ( you) in this field.
My campaigns got a very nice boost of traffic out of this ’slap’. I say bring them on more often:)
My traffic went up
What I don’t understand is why my content site is struggling to get traffic and good QS and my one page landing pages somehow survived the slap (at least this time) and now earning 3x more.
P.S.
Amit, for some reason I can’t post comments on your blog using my website link (niche-affiliate-marketing.com) under website URL field?
Not sure why wordpress is labeling my comments as spam?
Hi Gee,
That’s strange that your website is getting blocked! We just recently upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, it may have to do with that.
-Amit
Thanks for the interesting reading. Does anyone know whether the self proclaimed google slap “Adwords Mystery Solved” by Shariq at http://www.doubleyourctr.com/GoogleSlapSolution/?hop=download6 is or is not in any way helpful to really avoiding the google slap? I know you get what you pay for, and for $67, I shouldn’t expect too much, but I don’t want to waste time and money. Thanks.
So by Google slap you simply mean the time when they update site PR?
Cheers