I've started promoting a site of mine with affiliate links and adsense, using adwords. Some of the things I've read here worry me a bit. Is it true sites whose purpose is to make money through affiliate programs are blacklisted? I still see a lot of that kind of sites using adwords. Even site without any information, only lists of affiliate links (at least my site contains some useful info). I've read in some post here that Adwords judges the quality of you landing page amongst other things by the presence of sitemap, contact and about us links. I have them on my site (edit: except about us. I'm just some guy trying to earn a buck on the internet. I don't think I should write that and I don't know how to make it sound any nicer than that). Can I assume that I'm safe now? I don't want to screw up my account now while I've just started. Thanks in advance for any answers.
No this is wrong, it is not blacklisted! The more important is content - write a lot of text content to your website. about 500 ~1000 words related on relevant keywords that you are planning to bid - is important also to have level 1 or level 2 of links - not only a frontpage - so is good to have a complete structured site.
Thanks for another helpful answer, Micromag. Here comes another question. My site has a couple of thousand words of relevant text. My landing page only a 160 though. Could this be a problem?
just as an FYI: you can stop the google quality bot from checking your site, read more here: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=38197
Sorry, No one knows the Google these quality Score algorithm details (only G employees). Are you getting problem setting your website as landing page? I Would give it a try - if you set it as landing page I would only worry if 95% of the keywords become inactive with bids of $5 and $10 - if you are not getting this situation, concentrate in focusing AdWords side: optimizing your campaign, keywords and ads - not your website.
Apparently Google takes a "guilty unless proven innocent" approach and views sites that can't be spidered as untrustworthy, and will subsequently give them a low quality score.
No.. You still can do money via affiliate programs using Adwords... The rules have changed thought... you onle need to tweak few things, and you are set to go Tim