I am one of the thousands of people who got shut down by Google's new landing page quality score algorthim, and after a month of trial and error, I have come up with some methods that work. The first thing I learned is that if you have an adwords account that was blacklisted and you have thousands of keywords and campaigns running, there is very litttle that you can do to get that account up and running again. I built content rich webpages with no adsense on them and all original content. I put no more than 2 affiliate links on the page, in some cases none at all. I basically tested pages that had zero ways to make a profit or sell something on them and the result was that they still received the high $5 to $10 minimum bids. My conclusion is that the revelevancy of the page does not matter, Google is using the site quality score against my whole account not just specific campaigns or keywords. So this is what I have done after making this realization: My wife opened a new adwords and adsense account in her name. She purchased a new domain name. We designed a new landing page for our targeted keywords and uploaded the new page on her new Google account. (note: we used the same keywords from my old account that are requiring $5 bids as we are using on the new one), and activated it. And guess what, we got our ad listed for 5 cents per click. Remember that this is a brand new domain, it is not in the SERPS, and if you believe in the sandbox, it is in there. Also this page has no CTR history either for Google to base pricing on. What did we do to the page that was different from our old website pages? We added more content. From what I have been reading about this, it is a good idea to have at least 500 words on any given page. I have also read that it is very important to Google that you have an about us, contact us, terms of use, and site-map link on every page. And we added this to our pages. Another thing that is important is ease of navigation, G does not want webpages that are deserted islands on the internet. If you are using a one page sales letter on your site and you do not offer the visitor the chance to learn more about you or navigate the other pages on your site, this is seen as not offering a friendly user experience to your customer. We put adsense ads on the new pages, 2 boxes, and we also put text links to some of our affiliate programs. But to me, one of the most important changes that we made was adding a deeper layer of content within our own site, and link to it from the original landing page. This allows the visitor to get more information and stay on your site. The last thing that we have done is link to another site that is not on the first page of the google organic search results that is well made and has a good Google page rank. That way, we are offering another way for my visitors to find the info they are looking for if they did not find it on our site while also adding an outbound link to a high PR website. By making these changes, we have noticed a few things. One is that the CTR is lower on adsense ads, but with the added content, G is able to better select the ads they are placing, and the overall earnings for us is higher. (We are getting better quality advertisers) And one other thing I have noticed so far, not one MFA ad on my site!! So I guess the bottom line on this is, you have to really spend time making a quality content based site with easy navigation and a balance between adsense ads, affiliate links, and outbound links to authority websites that are offering similar content... But I guess any SEO pro would have told me that anyway!
Interesting observations. Thank you for sharing. Anyone else experience their entire account being "blacklisted"?
This is terrific. Google knows how to make the internet the best it can be so they are using their power to tell webmasters how to design their sites by rewarding them with the Google rating of a better quality score. This will help us create a more useful World Wide Web and make it easier to implement large projects on it through the cooperation of webmasters who need a better quality score. Google Rox! JJ
well if G is on the side of information is power! and wants us to share knowledge.. how about not charging us for clicks and we can do the best informative sites out there and share them without any worries, lets share then..google rox.. if you sell a widget set..how can you put that much info on a single product?? pft whatever.. I do see the need for more content but it's nonsense to happen on adwords in this way imo..I'll switch to msn.
Ya. Why to pay if I can't make my on decisions and business plans? If my page isn't good enought, Google should say why, and not let me advertise that page... I'll make a better page. But I should be the one who decide haw I sell my products/services, not Google, because I pay. My money, my decision.
Hi Moso If they come right out and tell us then all of the crybabies would make a lot of noise about it. So instead they give us hints and clues to nudge us into building proper websites. They have access to huge amounts of data and know waaaaaay better than us what works. And they are helping us achieve that. JJ
All the decisions are yours. If you don't like how they handle things don't use them. Doesn't get any simplier than that.
Agreed, IMO Who is google to tell me how to implement my website? I dropped them and went with MSN adcenter. Cost is slightly cheaper and conversion is slightly higher. So i guess i should thank google.
Google influences webmasters aiming at organic SERPs, i thought the whole point of adwords was a paid shortcut for the crappier/less optimized sites???
This is actually great observation, I am printing it out so that I can read it later with a relaxed mind as well. IT