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
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.”