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 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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