Google's new landing page algorithm causing $10 minimum bids on thousands of sites!

If you have time to read it, Graywolf shares some of the shit he found in his account, today morning :

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/7386

 

Pretty simple.

Let's say pre-adjustment, his landing page was poor-mediocre. But had written a killer ad and picked not-so-competitive keywords. That could eaisly result in a high ad ranking. And especially if they go on top, in the blue bar, your CTR can soar in no time. Without adding the time span in the screenshot, that pic means nothing.

Now fast forward to post-adjustment... In the ranking algo they added more weight to quality score, landing page etc. and less to CTR and CPC. Bang, past performance means nothing anymore, 'ad experience' just isn't good enough according to their algo, despite the ad itself probably being pretty good from an advertiser point of view.

Desperate times take drastic measure to initiate change. Advertisers need financial incentive to improve to a standard Google wants to offer its end users.

Anyway, I better check my 6 accounts and 1000s of ads, maybe I'm in deep shit myself

 

Seems fair enough for me .. But I'm not really pissed because my main income doesn't come from Arbitrage. Adwords the least.

If I had a 5 figure expenditure on Adwords only, I would've been on fire now.

But anyway, the landing page quality to be THAT important ? I mean from nothing to 70-80% ?

 

My accounts seem fine, at a glance.

Just to comment on this:

That obviously can't be the case because you can stick your conversion code in a php script ON THE LANDING PAGE that randomly loads the code say 40% of the time and voila, Google reports 40% conversion.

EDIT:

That's the main clue to me. If you were Google, and you ALREADY have a quality score for natural listings, would you use that same score for landing page quality? I would! He's not indexed so it's a mystery page as far Google is concerned. Google relies on PR calculations yet he admits not having any links to it. So how does he expect Google to come to a good quality score for the landing page? I said earlier in this thread I suspected it's tied in with their main source of Intellectual Property, this confirms that.

Makes perfect sense to me why most of his keywords got booted... Regardless of whether it's fair or not.

 

I agree. If a page cannot be found in the natural listings for those keywords then its not really relevant to the query. Discounting sandboxed sites and assuming google has got its natural serps right of course.

 

Add to that the following: Whenever I launch a new site and start its Ad campaign, it always costs loads in terms of CPC until it starts ranking for those terms.

I had a successfully ranking site with ads for the same keywords. They were about £0.10 a click. Moved those to a new, not ranking site. Copied the EXACT ads, and they cost over £0.60 to get the same ad ranking. I left them run alongside eachother to monitor it as well. OK, the new ads obviously lost their performance data, but still, it's not until the landing page starts ranking that the price can come down for the same ad position.

I have no doubt whatsoever Ad Ranking (quality score) and natural listings are connected.

 

I have to disagree here, as landing pages for PPC should ideally be robots excluded as you DO NOT want them in the natural index simply because they are PPC pages NOT MEANT to be spidered. A PPC page is there to convert your PPC traffic, it will NOT be linked to from within the site, but it WILL link into the site it should also be highly rich in keywords etc. This can give the appearance of a doorway page meant to spam the Search Engines, so for this reason alone I recommend excluding the robots from your PPC landing pages.

This now throws a whole crock of shit into the equation here. How can google evaluate a landing page when they are excluded from spidering it?

 

I don't agree with this OWG. I tend to create inner pages that will hopefully rank well in the serps and then direct PPC clicks at these pages as well. I don't use adsense on any sites.

Why are PPC landing pages not suitable to be linked from the main site? Are you saying that the content should be much higher on the real pages to allow the PPC pages to convert better? If so then maybe I would agree to an extent.

 

I see the use of separation for feedback purposes but the benefit isn't high enough to justify making two pages of everything, one public/natural and one ppc/hidden. What's the true point of that?

And if you just block them by robots.txt doesn't mean they don't get links etc. Still giving Google a good idea of 'popularity' and quality.

 

Ok one of the main ways to conversion is to re-enforce the offer in the advert. Here is something I posted here the other day.

Adwords conversion shoots up when you create proper landing pages matched to the advert. By doing it this way you can have multiple landing pages for the same product with different adverts. You can then monitor conversions and find out what page/offer converts best. Now you can't have multiple pages in your main site as it would appear spammy, and it doesn't conform.

Here are the top 10 adwords ads for cheap hosting

Web Page hosting £5.95
1GB webspace, 15GB traffic
350 mailboxes, 24/7 support
www.webfusion.co.uk

The above advert sends traffic to the homepage where the information in the advert is not readily available. If it was directed to a landing page that said

1GB of fast linux space blah blah
15 GB of traffic monthly, with no cap, simply pay more if you use more blah blah
350 Mailboxes POP3 blah blah
24/7 support blah blah

BUY NOW ONLY £5.95

I would stake my left testicle on the fact that conversions would sky rocket. When people click on the adwords ad, they are attracted by the Content of the advert and the headline. If you do not follow that through then you are throwing money away.

At a very minimum they should be directing traffic to this page http://www.webfusion.co.uk/hosting/fusion-starter-windows-asp-net/

The same can be said for all the others below.

UK Web Hosting just £1.59
1500MB data transfer, 15 POP3s,
Webmail, Web stats, full FTP access
www.123-reg.co.uk

UK Web Hosting £13.41/yr
250 MB Space, 100 Email Accounts
Unlimited Traffic, Free Domain
www.theemailshop.net

Web Hosting £2.49 p.m
2.5 GB Webspace & 10 GB Bandwidth
£300 Free Software & Fast/Free Sup.
www.HeartInternet.co.uk/HostingNow

Instant Web Hosting
Get online now. Free setup & help.
Superb home and business deals.
www.fasthosts.co.uk

Cheap UK Web Hosting
Quality Web Hosting Under £2/month
MYSQL, PHP, Free Domain & More!
www.Webhosting.uk.com

Best 10 Web Hosting Chart
Reviews of the Top 10 Web Hosting
Companies - Evaluated by Webmasters
www.TheHostingChart.com

Webhosting for free
0€ for 1 GB web space 10 GB traffic
500 Email accounts 1 GB per account
www.strato-hosting.co.uk/webhosting

 

True bit still, why do you want to 'hide' the alternative landing pages?

When you create 5 ads with 5 dedicated landing pages that have pretty unique content, why not give them a chance in the SERPs as well?

 

Because it is spamming
I mean look at it like this.

2 ducks for £1
blah blah blah

Buy cheap ducks
Same sort of rehashed blah balah blah

Ducks, 2 for £1
Same sort of rehashed blah balah blah

HOW MANY DUCKING PAGES CAN YOU PUT UP WITH?

For this reason I keep them away from the search engines and the general traffic. The pages are meant to be seen in isolation, in association with the PPC advert copy. It is simple using the PPC link as a 'more' link. This brings the best returns.

Google is starting to take issue with orphaned pages, or pages that are not part of the main navigation system. PPC pages are in effect SPAMMY AS HELL so that, together with their being orphaned or having few relatives, is reason enough to block them.

 

OK I see, very noble of you

So did you find all your orphanted pages' campaigns going up in minimum bids?

 

Hi folks, this thread is a really good read. Hopefully, someone from Google will see how many frustrated AdWord users they've got and will "adjust" their new algo.

I personally stopped my AdWords campaign - will wait and see how things will go. This whole thing does NOT make much sense period. I agree that those MFA sites have to be penalized but this is NOT the way to do it.

What did Google achieve here? Lost revenues, advertisers? What else? Did all those MFA sites went offline overnight? Did other PPC, email and numerios other means of advertising stopped sending traffic too sites with Google AdSense?

Now about the new algo. It is simply too buggy and not well designed. Here a couple of examples:

1. I have two keywords
a. idiot proof diet
b. diet idiot proof

Keyword (a) minumum bid is set to 5 dollars whereas keyword (b) minimum bid is NOT affected. Quality of landing pages? I do not think so! Google is simply saying that because keyword (a) brings much more traffic, you have to pay way more to use it.

2. I was doing some research on the keywords that were affected by the new Google algo and found numerous sites that are still using those keywords BUT have NO real content. The best one I found what a landing page that displayed a cute message "Sorry the page you were looking for is not found, please look at these links instead" - there were approximately 20 affiliate links with brief descriptions and AdSense blended.

Well, we can beat this topic to death, discuss the importance of getting rid of abusers. But, unfortunately, this new algo is nothing but a big mistake and I hope that Google will either change it or get rid of it.

BTW Why not just implement a system that will not pay for a click on AdSense ad if a referrer is an AdWords ad? This would make much more sense to me

 

That is, like, the biggest assumption, like, I've ever heard.

 

I have looked at a few client sites, and they are not affected by this, time will tell though

 

My site was not affected until yesterday afternoon. I guess Google is implementing this in batches.

 

I agree with the theory OWG but the scenario you are describing will fail big time IF google are using the organic results to determine the quality of the landing pages.

Even if they don't then they may not think that a bunch of un-indexed 'spammy' pages are classed as quality landing pages.

 

This is my argument though Mad4 WHO THE HELL are google to tell people how to run their marketing campaigns? This is why I can see some court action being taken over it. Kinderstart had no case yet they are going for it, and what Google are doing HAS to be bordering on illegality or anti trust at least. You can NOT tell a paying advertiser that you are going to charge them more because you don't like the look of their site.


As I said earlier, if you tried to place an advert in a newspaper and were told that asyour shop is messy you must pay 5 times the rate, you would tell them to get stuffed. In fact, you could probably go to trading standards and make a complaint AND WIN.

In fact, I am going to have a word with some friends.

This will come back and bite google on the arse big time IMO.

 

I actually am starting to agree there could be a class action on this. I think it is illegal to charge someone who goes the same distance, selling the same exact thing a different amount. In this case it would be the same keyword, distance is not an issue and some people get to bid $0.10 and some are forced to bid $10.00.

This is discrimination.

You cannot discriminate based on color of skin (only help a la affirmative action), so you shouldn't be able to discriminate based on the color of my site.

Also, Google has said people in the AdWords group and throughout Google are allowed to run campaigns, now with these rules and them knowing how to get around it, just ridiculous is all I have to say.