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

Ah ah, so many people hating Google now, while 48h ago you would get bad rep for criticizing Google Inc. as a public company.

I've always thought click arbitrage was a dishonest way of making money. Google Inc. confirms it, its affecting the reputation of their Adwords program. Many scraper sites owners were making big money with content from wikipedia and sometimes stolen articles, lets stop being hypocrite, you played and lost.

I'm really sorry for the serious webmasters that have put hard work in their sites with quality content and that are being penalized. It's not fair i agree.

The best solution is that Google should manually review every ad like Overture.

I love Overture, too bad they get much less traffic than Adwords network.

Google please hire more staff!!!!!!!!!!!! am tired of their algos kicking legit advertisers out of adwords, decreasing the ranks of legit sites within their search engine natural results, and their bot emails.

Huge profit margins, cant afford more staff. Profit at the expense of customers.

 

I particularly like this part of your post. I think it is spot on.

 

I have emailed the above to Adwords support, and now they claim that if you do pay enough, your landing page (site) can be garbage! so much for creating good landing pages...

"Even though the advertisers you are mentioning might not have a very high Quality Score, they might be paying a high CPC."

who said "content is king" ? as long as you have money who cares about what crap you peddle.

 

I've just checked and about 7,000 of my 9,000 keywords are now inactive with $5 & $10 minimum bids!!

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that it's fitting that google's own Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines has got the completely wrong page title?

Another almighty screw-up from big G!!!

 

Funny... I have two tiny click arbitrage landing pages that haven't been effected at all (yet).

If they do it's rather simple... I'll fill the page with a bunch of content and links, hidden with css of course and keep the landing page looking just like it was before

Gotta give them a C+ for effort though

 

Did any of the Adsense publishers in this thread, notice any increase in their Adsense earnings, to to this Adwords quality rating overload ?

 

How is click arbitrage dishonest? Is day trading stocks dishonest to?

Not everyone doing it is using stolen or scraped content.

 

Why is everyone mad at G for cleaning this problem up? I HATE searching for something and ending up on some crap MFA site. Adsense has totally polluted the Internet.
It sucks for the people who got hit by this, but you know all good things come to an end, looks like it's finally over, thank God.

:::waits for red reps:::

 

ly2... this isn't over.. by far. It's an automated system which can easily be tricked just like the regular search engine. Hell... my (admittedly crappy) landing pages work like a charm and have yet to get penalised by this new price gouging. If/when they do... like i said... hidden content time

::: no i wont red you lol :::

 

Yeah, I have a feeling MFA's will adjust just fine and average joe blow advertiser will be left scratching his head.

 

There u go, did u favour

 

Sites that were made before Adsense was invented are trusted so much in google they can show whatever they like and still be classed as a good resource.

 

The one thing in all this is that it doesn't quite ring true.

If a landing page is not of a high enough quality, then surely the answer is to block it as an acceptable landing page and notify the advertiser to bring it up to scratch.

What google are effectively saying is:-

Your landing page is crap, and we are not happy sending traffic there, but if you pay us considerably more then we will!

Sorry but somehow to me that is not quality control at all. If this is an arbitrage attack, then simply block filter it by pages that are showing adsense.

OTOH why not run the adsense system propery and have quality control guidelines on adsense publishing sites. If a page is not good enough then simply show public service ads until it is brought up to standard.

 

Do you have any idea how much money these arbitrage sites (combined) are spending? Google must be profiting HUGE amounts from these sites. I spend anywere from $75-200 PER DAY on adwords for my 2 landing pages and I'm just a small user.... and then on the adsense arbitrage sites.. they profit some more for those clicks... so they basically get to squeeze even more money from that user.

As a "profits" oriented public company with stock prices to maintain... they would be insane to just "ban" all these landing pages paying them millions of dollars.

 

I hear people make lots of money from prositution and drug dealing, but surely that is not a valid argument for the legalisation of it?

It is a black and white issue isn't it! If the pages are not good enough, then what difference is charging the advertiser more money to advertise going to make? We are EITHER talking QUALITY, or MONEY. Google can not have it both ways now can they.

Google are still hiding behind the 'do no evil' thing and it is not ringing true any more, if this is about poor quality sites using arbotrage, then police it. Why should this affect sites that are not displaying adsense?

 

And both of those things are illegal... last I heard arbitrage was not?

It's not about quality.. they are a business, it's all about profits.

 

I think the effect of inflated minimum bids will be that advertisers will start improving their landing pages. Once something becomes economically viable to do, they'll get their asses into gear.

I think we need a few months to see what happens.

 

It's not just the landing pages Tops ..

 

Sorry, I thought after I wrote that , that it sounded like I was comparing them. I wasn't

What rights do google have to decide how a site owner designs their site, and spends their money?

I used to have a newspaper, and I can honestly say that I would NEVER have had a conversation along the lines of.

"Sorry mister advertiser but your shop is really scruffy and messy, so I am going to have to charge you 10 times the normal advertising rate until you sort your shop out"

Because THAT is a direct comparison to what Google have just done. They have no right to do this, and it also might be technically illegal, I would be interested to get a legal opinion on it.

Google are running things algorithmically, which is all fine and dandy with regard organic search. When it comes to PAID traffic though, there MUST be transparency in charges and systems. Using ambiguous terms like 'high enough quality' etc does not wash in a court of law.

I think it will be a short time before we see some sort of legal challenge,or request for transparency in this new charging system.

 

I know, but in the case of bad landing pages, that's the biggest factor for them. Now they just 'outmuscle' that criterion by paying a lot already, causing a headache to 'real' advertisers. Now the minimum CPC goes up 1000%, they won't be able to get out of bad ad ranking the easy way.