Very Frustrated with Google's Latest Attack on Affiliates

I'm certain I'm not the only one, but this last week was seriously heart wrenching for me. Google not only took down my top earning ad, but ALL of my ads across multiple sites.

It was the typical Google slap that claimed relevancy, but rather something I haven't encountered before. My sites that previously had a quality score of 7+ went to 1. And instead of saying I need to increase my bid amount, all the status says is, "Below first page bid
Rarely shown due to low quality score"

I've done some digging and apparently they are trying to reduce/eliminate sites that consist of a lot of affiliate links. I'm not the only one who is having issues, that's for certain. So the question is why are some review sites (consisting of affiliate links) still up? The thing they all seem to have in common is that they use php redirects instead of a normal affiliate link.

So this morning, I did something rather painstaking and went through one of my sites and converted every affiliate link to a php redirect. There were probably about 100 of them. I should also mention that the site includes several reviews with no affiliate links. The primary goal was to get a page which was converting really really really well back on Google.

So I ran a test... I set up a new ad group using the same keywords and ran it.

45 minutes later(after letting it run for a few minutes)... I get the same status report, "Below first page bid
Rarely shown due to low quality score"

My initial quality score of 7 dropped to 1 and the ads were all taken down.

I am so incredibly frustrated right now and I'm not sure where to go from here. If anyone has had a similar experience you over came, please let me know. Any advice (other than try other networks- which I'm already doing...) would be much appreciated. Thanks!

oh, and if you'd like to look at the site, PM me. I'm not sure if I can post here or not, so I won't.

 

UPDATE!

So, after making that post, I went through my site one more time to see if I missed any affiliate links, and what do you know... I had an image that was still an affiliate link.

Not sure if this will fix the problem, as Google seems to like to approve my ads, let them run for a few minutes then take them down... but we'll see.

Still want to see what others have to say about this. Since DP is made up of a lot of affiliates, I'd like to see how others are handling this problem. Also, since this probably won't last forever, even if it does work for now, I'd like to see what others are planning (without giving away too much strategy) for the future.

 

UPDATE 2.0

And they took them down again, with the same generic status update. I should mention that I'm using iframe php redirects instead of normal redirects... does this make a difference?

 

Why would Google not like affiliate links if you put them on your own site? They maybe do not like if you directly take the visitor to the affiliate's site and not yours.

 

No, they've actually started blocking sites that contain "mostly affiliate links." I've seen quite a few posts about it on blogs, etc.

 

I had a similar situation. 3 sites that had qs of 10 went to qs of 1 overnight. Ironically, 1 of the sites is the #1 organic result on Google for the keywords.

Asked G. to review them and they said poor landing page quality. None of the sites direct linked, so that's not the problem.

Strangely I had 1 other site in the same family of affiliate sites with exactly the same structure and it went un-touched.

I think it's some sort of manual review - when a site gets to a high enough click through someone at G. must look at it and if you get the wrong clerk it's over for you.

From what I can tell, you need to get a new domain to re-run adwords.

 

Going to try a different type of product/new domain and I'll post on it depending on the result. I kind of had a suspicion that someone at Google was hand checking sites, but I have no way to back it up other than the initial review (automated) comes back fine, but after the ad is up a few minutes, it seems to get shut down.

I've considered opening a new google account with new domain, but same content to see what happens. Have to wonder if your account gets flagged once they visit a site. Reading further, it says in their landing page guidelines "be careful" using "bridging" sites, which is what review pages are.

Thanks for sharing your experience btw. I should mention that from everything I've read, organic results have remained mostly untouched.

 

Is this the end of one-page websites i.e. squeeze pages? That would put a lot of people in a bad situation since most landing pages are full of affiliate links.

 

Unfortunately this is the way of Google, that's why so many affiliates are leaving google behind

 

In exchange for???? Yahoo!????

Yikes. Not that i think yahoo is bad but they just don''t have the search volume of google.

 

What industry are you? Your account might have had a manual review done

 

Sorry to hear that.. but I have 4 accounts wrapped into MCC but not a single one got affected.. hmm, just wondering what criteria are they using.

 

Yahoo is going to have to become your new friend. Sad as it may sound.

 

You can 'change' your links and your website all your want. Your domain has been slapped and google doesnt love it anymore. You need a new domain.

 

Is this a widespread issue?

 

Your account probably got hit when it went under periodic review and then manually checked / slapped. There are still others advertising with lots of affiliate links because they haven't been 'caught' yet - I would expect a large majority of them to also be slapped when Google does a periodic review of them.

Unfortunately for you guys Google is no longer a ppc engine you can really use - they have stated that Affiliate sites are likely to attract a low Quality Score

 

Too bad to read such a thread.

Well. Keep posting updates please and best of luck to you.

 

I bet Bing/Microsoft is jumping for joy right now. Google should be ashamed for all the things they are doing to their customers, adsense and adwords with Microsoft and Yahoo gunning for them.

 

I was promoting health supplements and "make money" type courses.

Is there any way to determine for sure that a manual review was done?

 

Have tried a few domains which all resulted in the same bogus slap...