The Landing Page Quality Score & What Google Ultimately Wants…
July 16th, 2008 by 
Amit
I wanted to do a follow up post on recent post I did about the latest Google Slap.
After taking a closer look at my Google account, I noticed I actually had been hit by this most recent Google Slap. For several of my search campaigns I discovered that almost half my min bids had shot up from 0.05-0.20 to 0.50 or more.
Luckily this slap had only effected a few of my campaigns, all for one affiliate offer. This is why I didn’t notice the slap until I took a closer look.
At first I couldn’t understand what had happened, I had everything Google could possibly want:
- Targetted landing pages
- A real site with 100s of pages of unique content and fresh content added every week
- Lots of incoming links and page rank
- Etc, etc…
Finally I took a closer look at the adgroups that had gotten hit, and them it struck me:
ALL of the adgroups that had gotten hit all had ads going to aliased domains!
Here’s the thing: for this niche I have about 30 or so aliased domains. Having aliased domains that contain the keyword you’re bidding on is a great way to dramatically increase your CTR and even your conversion rate.
So if I had an adgroup about green widgets that was getting a lot of traffic, I would buy a domain like : get-green-widgets.com, and use this domain as an alias to my root domain. This way I could use this domain in my display url for my Google ad and get a SUPER high CTR.
It was all working great, until now!
I decided to dump all my aliases for my slapped campaigns. I switched all my ads over to my root domain and BAM, my min bids went back down right away.
I had a great discussion about all of this with Tom, one of my top partners and advisers, here’s what we concluded:
- Google sees using aliases in your display url as spam, after all would ebay or amazon use an aliased domain? I suspect this is what Google thinks, I don’t agree with it though.
- Every time Google rolls out a slap (Quality Score Update) they’re raising the bar as to what it considers a quality site. The bottom line is that Google is looking for advertisers that are building a long term business & a real site off of one or a handful of domains. Google does NOT want advertisers that are launching one thin site after another, just to make a quick buck.
Now what would a real site, that you’re building a long term business off of, look like?
Would the site have more than 5 pages?
How about unique content? Think a real site would have a lot of it?
Do you think fresh content would be added to such a site on a daily or weekly basis?
If it’s a real site, any chance it would have incoming links and a decent PR (overtime)?
If you’re still wonder how to build an affiliate site that won’t get Google slapped, I JUST TOLD YOU.
google landing page quality score google slap
Posted in Google™ AdWords, Super Affiliate Mindset | 
Amit–
How are you still running adwords campaigns with aliased domains since Google changed the display URL requirement back in April requiring that display/destination URL match?
We still have a few older campaigns where alias domains are running, but are even having trouble with frequent disapproval of legitimate tracking URLs that abide by the new policy.
What have you been doing to set up domain aliases? (And yes, I read your post where you advised to dump them!)
Thanks.
Thank you Amit!
I am glad I read this as I had recently just learned of this Alias URL technique!
I have six to ten page sites that each have blogs that did not get slapped!
I am adding to their blogs each week and I update with new content every few weeks.
Actually what I get from your story is that Google is putting a heavier weight on incoming links and PageRank. If they really would have thought your alias domains were trash they would’ve just slapped it with 5 to 10 dollar bids.
I do agree with you though PageRank and Incoming links are VERY important. We usually wait about 6 months, before we advertise a new site on Adwords.
I got a lot of questions, from your readers actually.. on what other pages they should come up with, in order to not direct link to the sponsor page. I handed out some examples but maybe this is something you wanna do a follow up on as well.
Good post Amit !
Just in time when I was looking for some information on this…thanks! Do you think there are any CMS for this process?
Google’s definitely raising the bar - but is this a good thing or a bad thing?
For one, Google’s revenues are going to go down - that’s for sure - they’re making less money from all of the “get rich quick” advertisers.
Also, sometimes advertisers need to purchase advertising to get a *new* site started. How would they do that when Google slaps all of the sites without established rankings?
If I had an established site with good PR and backlinks and everything, I’d rely on organic traffic - not paid traffic.
I’m not sure how this is good for Google.
Hi Amit, question about real-site vs single-landing-page-site:
1- A real site has navegation elements like navbar and sidebar, if you have landing pages integrated in this real site, do these LP have these navegation elements? If so, don’t you think that these navegation elements are wayouts that could reduce your conversions?
2- What do you think about several LP under the same domain? If you add a new offer weekly you have a site with several pages and weekly updated so for Google it could look like a real site, what do you think?
3- If you have real content and LP integrated in a real site, which ratio of content-LP do you think is better? 50%50% for example? Do your integrated LP look like LP?
Excuseme if I asked you many questions, I don’t want to waste your time. Thanks in advance
AffiliateSupportTeam ,
What your saying is even with relevant Great Landers, hundreds of relevant unique content pages, high CTRS , The real issues are:
linking to an offer (sales page of merchant)
The number of inbound links
Page rank?
WOW So Google is phasing out Affiliate Marketing then.
Im curious where these domains just redirecting to your root domain or did they have exactly the same content? or where they different sites altogether?
@kevin - I have a few affiliate sites that are just ‘blogs’ and they seemed to do fine through this past google slashing
Good Post, very informative.
Although I’d have to think, they can’t be slapping every page just because the keyword is in it, maybe it is just the super suspicious looking ones or something? However, I’m going to try to attempt to do what you said. There was someone else bidding on something similiar to what I’am, with the keyword in the display url, however, they are still there with the keyword in the url and I’am not. But we’ll see, but if you say they went back, I’ll get it a shot after switching over to your root-domain.
Another great post Admit! I never thought of aliased domains as spam, but you make a very valid point.
For my quality score, I treat EACH site I place in AdWords just like it is a site I’m doing organic SEO for. I get several high quality incoming links and ensure that there are several pages of unique content. I was also effected my the most recent Google Slap, because I tried to rush one of my sites on AdWords, before it was fully developed, thus it was considered a “thin site.”
Just wanted to mention another google quality score factor which is the time the landing page takes to load. The quicker it loads the better the quality score is.
Hey Amit,
Great post. Your blog really stands out to me b/c you often go into very specific areas of your business that most people simply are not willing to discuss.
This post is no exception.
Great information!
Thanks,
Robert
In My Humble Opinion:
I think Google culls for best use and highest ROI ( sorry they aren’t altruistic) for themselves every few Months on IMer sites.
The future for networks such as CB is to allow us to host on their site to make it look as though we are the merchant.
Even with hundreds of unique targeted highly optimized pages, blogs,forums- any site the links to a network (other than theirs!)is subject to greater scrutiny.
Amit you need a forum!
And it’s s great step towards your training products!
great points… if you want to be viewed as a legit site, you need more than just landing pages.
Rakesh from India here,
Well, google is always in a quality control mode. But it will really decrease CTR by NOT using domain aliases.
BTW: I just noticed in your sidebar that you have a plugin missing to display recent posts..
Pagerank and incoming links are not a factor in QS. The reason this APPEARS to be the case is because advertisers who have PR and incoming links ALSO tend to have established, historically high-QS accounts (based on previous QS eval by Google), and this makes their ADWORDS account high-trust, which is similar, but not the same as PageRank/organic domain trust.
Advertisers with old, high-trust Adwords accounts can launch brand-spanking new domains not aliased to their other domains in any way, and still get amazing Quality Scores.
People need to look beyond the surface of the issue and determine what the correlation is between high-quality organic sites and aged, high-trust Adwords accounts.
Geordie,
Thanks for the insight. If what you’re saying is in fact true, what could have been the issue in Amit’s case study here? I am assuning he used the same AdWords account in both instances; the alias domain, and his established domain, and got two toally different results.
In Amit’s case, the only variable was the Aliased domain… Can you provide more insight on what you think is going on?
Peter
Geordie,
Thanks!
That was an excellent statement. I had a quick question though do you think that spending more will result in more history or do you think just setting a small balance to build history up over time would work better? Do you see what I’m saying?
Which granted I know you can collect history faster and possibly optimize faster by collecting more data in short periods of time, but after awhile you’ll find something that get pretty good CTR then maybe just decrease your AVG spend each day until your bids go down after time??
What would be your opinion on that?
“Pagerank and incoming links are not a factor in QS.”
Sorry, but this is simply not true. Our firm has handled nearly a hundred accounts (ranging from one page small business all the way up to fortune 500 gorillas)
“The reason this APPEARS to be the case is because advertisers who have PR and incoming links ALSO tend to have established, historically high-QS accounts”
Most of the major clients we handled had sloppy or abandoned accounts attempted by someone in their “marketing” department. Trust me, the CPC on these new accounts would make you cry. Working with large, established sites is cake compared to an “aged” google account linking to a new site.
Just wondering if YSM allows alias domain (google is obviously out of question since their policy change).
I also want to ask the questions binary ant have asked but didn’t get answered;
1- A real site has navegation elements like navbar and sidebar, if you have landing pages integrated in this real site, do these LP have these navegation elements? If so, don’t you think that these navegation elements are wayouts that could reduce your conversions?
2- What do you think about several LP under the same domain? If you add a new offer weekly you have a site with several pages and weekly updated so for Google it could look like a real site, what do you think?
BTW great post and awesome blog
Hi Admit
what about
Instead of using a domain name alias can you just use a sub domain name and it not effective quality score?
Amit thanks for highlighting the slap (Slap updates could be a site in that) its interesting to watch this google slap thing unfold. At the end of the day it really starts to keep the shady cowboys/girls out unless they have very deep pockets. The people that will win are the searches and the merchants, searchers they will get a better experience and merchants will find affiliates that are willing to commit to better product and brand experiences. I’m still having no luck with the PPC game.
Cheers
James of Little Nomads which is still trying to figure out to make PPC work in a very crowded space!
Great Interview on webmasterradio.fm on this very topic.
http://www.webmasterradio.fm/Affiliate-Marketing/Affiliate-Marketing-Insider/Google-Slap-on-Affiliate-Marketing.htm
Amit, have any of you figured out a new way to split-test domains in AW, then? Like you, I now get slapped when I split-test aliased domains. We need to be able to split-test display URLs!
Thanks for the interesting article
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