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
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.