From Great to poor in the last few hours...

are you sure about that? sounds really bad, i had no clicks above the levels i set.

i noticed that my campaigns worst affected are ones with simple, single or dual page landing sites. one campaign that sends traffic to a large site with lots of pages was not affected at all. what kind of landing pages do you and the other guys here who are affected use?

 

Like pexcornel's. my landing pages are usually a simple description of the product with 1 to 3 images and direct link to buy the product/service.

Pretty much the standard affiliate landing page but nicer then the average.

Occasionally I have full review in details of the product, those also got slapped. Pretty much every thing going to my main affiliate site is getting slapped, would not be surprised that 100% of my links get slapper by day end.

It's actually still progressing...

I have another site (dfferent .com domain) with 1 main product that is still running so far. I personally think this site is as good looking....

 

For me it only seems to be occurring where im sending traffic direct to the affiliate page via an affiliate link. In other words the display URL is drastically different to the target url. My own landing pages are still doing okay.

 

Today, as soon as I get one click for a keyword, that keyword goes suddenly from Great to Pour, from 0.26 to 10$
That would disable all my keywords in 1-2 days time.
Pex

 

I saw this posted today (6/8/2007).

They also said it would not affect "the vast majority of advertisers."

 

Thanks for sharing. Mine are all direct link to my site...

The good news is that one click: 1 1 100.00% $1.92 $1.92 2.0
ended up being a sale with a real nice commision...

1 impression - 1 click - 1 sale: Take that Google for relevancy!


I'm probably going to hit the sack and check back later today. Hopefully this will all be solved.
I'm going to decrease my maximum budget for my campaigns with high limits (just in case it goes crazy on me)....

Pexcornel you say "I will take NO action against Google" but sometimes "me think", we should unite and become a lobby group strong enough to get Google to listen to us and our needs. A group with a few hundred affiliates representing millions of ad $ /month might get Google's attention.

Cheers,
Chris

 

Not "against". I said "towards"
I meant to say that I won't change anything on my campaigns nor in my landing page.
From what I know, they don't care about us, so why bother.
Regards.
Pex

 

I have been shafted by this too... very confusing. Looking forward to some sort of update, otherwise this could be it!

 

Same here; I was spending 1.000 EUR per day with Adwords but 80% of my keywords have been rendered inactive. If anyone knows of a work-around or possible fix, please post it or mail info AT nutkenz DOT net

I'm currently trying some solutions myself... I'll post any findings here.

 

I got some info from my Adwords rep. He said that some of my sites had been manually reviewed and deemed to be low quality.
With those sites I agree - or rather single landing pages, because that's what they are.
However the main site I'm interested in has many pages of content and also got hit. I'm still waiting for a reply as to why this is so.

It does seem as if it's a manual thing. I've been playing around with launching new ads.

If I create an ad that's exactly the same as one that got hit, I get Poor quality.
All I have to do is put in a different display url (even a made up domain), the target url stays the same - the quality score is ok or great. It's as if my display url is blacklisted.

 

I'm on my break at work.. so I don't have much time to read the other posts so i'm not 100% sure if someone gave this information.. but I spoke to a googler..

I tried to needle information from her.. and this is what I got..

#1 There wasn't a bug, and she checked around with supervisors and etc to check and she said there is no bug in the system, if there was, all users would receive an email that there's a bug and it could be possibly effecting their acount.


#2 I told her that my campaigns were "hyper-targeted" and I was really focusing on bringing my CPC down and I feel my pages where SUPER relevant. She said that the updated was STRICTLY based off of the landing page.

She stated it 3 times through out the call.. until she said it like this it didn't click:

"The update today effects where the traffic is going, you could have perfect campaign set up through your ad's and through your keywords, everythnig could be tightly knit, however it's based on your landing page"

so I double-checked and questioned her:

"So.. The update in my CPC is based off of the content, or lack there of on my landing page then correct" She confirmed it.

I told her inside the call that my campaign for my sales page was getting normal clicks, for normal prices and the keywords weren't that relevant, my Keyword density inside the page was horrible, and my ad's were only "fairly" targeted to try and raise my Click ratio..

That's when she re-explained the issue about the landing page itself.

For me.. My landing pages were very short, with ONLY links to my vendor page.. I'm giong to add tons of content, beef it up, and try again. If it still hurts.. I'm gonna text addnig relevant links to authority sites in the niche and see how that works.. I will be testing this tonight and all day tommorow and i'll try to keep you guys updated..

I'll check back on my lunch break..

-Derek

 

Count me in as unaffected. Although I did see an unusually low epc on my adsense account this morning. Happens sometimes and may have nothing to do with the adwords qc changes.

 

Believe whatever you want, that's cool. I haven't seen any evidence in accounts I have access to to support the "bug" theory and generally take everything I read in the forums with a grain of salt.

For what it's worth I spoke with my relationship manager and they said there's no "bug". Google's a big company though and just like every other big company ask 20 people the same question and expect a variety of different answers.

 

apologies guyfromchicago, i guess this time around you're right! i am back to work on some of my sites...

 

No need and no worries. This forum is all about discussion and that's what we've been doing. Good luck getting your campaigns sorted.

 

Welcome to the world of Landing Page marketing with Google AdWords, lol!

I'm going to say this right from the start, you are most probably screwed. If Google have slapped you with $10 minimum bids then most things you try to change on your landing page *won't* effect the prices. Once Google has your domain flagged as an affiliate landing page, then in my years of experience using AdWords you won't recover from it.

What you should do instead is as follows:

Register a brand new domain and use this for your landing pages, scrap your old domain.
When rebuilding your new landing page you need to add a contact us, sitemap, privacy policy and terms and conditions pages as standard.
You then need to add *lots* of unique content, a "simple description of the product with 1 to 3 images and direct link to buy the product/service" is no longer enough and hasn't been for a long time.
Instead write original reviews of the product/service your are using. Do not just copy the content from the merchants site that you are promoting.
As well as writing your own reviews get some independant reviews up from third parties.
Put some genuine comparisons up of comparable products/services.
Also promote/discuss some other products/services that are related to the product/service you are promoting.

Take a look at this article which has some useful information, especially the following:

In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your landing page consists of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), you should provide as much information as you can beyond what your ad describes. For example, if your ad mentions <'Free travel information,' your landing page should feature free travel information (versus links to other sites that do).
You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site).​

Basically, landing pages/affiliate pages/doorway pages are in my opinion, a short term method of making money online. A couple of years ago you could stick up a site with a few lines of text and a banner and Google AdWords was happy. Not so now, since early 2006 they have started to crack down on affiliate sites and landing pages that don't offer real "value" to the end user.

Good luck!

 

My most stable and long-term campaign got totally bush-whacked by this... All the main keywords are at $10.00 from great and okay before.

 

I got an email back from rep. at Google she gave me the ""same old".

This is really a bunch of bull...(pardon my french). Had to get this out.

I pretty much had a sales/deals/coupons directory site. So not much more to say then "Want to save $30 use code: XXXXXX" or "Want to get free shipping use code: XXXXXX".

This seems pretty true to me since my competition with even less content is still present.

No sure I understand 100%. But if you are saying that it looks like they have blacklisted certain URLs. This appears true for me, at this point. Again my landing pages are above most of what you see out there. Took me a year of planning and studing this field before launching my site.

Thanks Kieron. I unfortunatly think you are right. Thanks for the tips, that's probably were I will be going.

I think Google made a mistake by flagging my site. Kieron would you mind if I pm'ed you my site for you opinion.


I think Kieron is right, my site is dead (99% of my campaigns going to that site). So I don't have much to lose at this point. What i'm going to do in the next few days.

- I'm going to experiment hard with logic.
I think I will quickly come to the conclusion that my "display url site" is blacklisted.

- I'm going to try to escalate this issue with Google with what I believe to be true: "It is an error. My site appears to have been incorrectly manually flagged. My site is a 100% affiliate site and it shamelessly stands by the savings people can make, using it."

-I'm probably going to do some gardening. Dig a hole, plant some perennials...burn some energy....

If anyone has some tips post them here or pm me if more private.

If you are senior dude/dudette in this fields and would like to review my site, let me know I will pm it to you with any details you might want.

If you think this can not happen to you, think twice. My site is not your average sloppy "FrontPage" type site. It's MySQL driven uses advanced stylesheets and as a full Administrator back end to manage it. It has all the links (policy, privacy,contact us with Form and even a telephone number). It's a totally legit site. I'm a programmer and had been working on that site for nearly 6 months!

Anyway time to eat....Thanks everyone.

 

First conclusion from experiment:

1) On one of my campiagn, i had created. months ago and paused, an ad with a direct link to the vendor. My ads performed better. So same campaign, same ad group, same keyword. Now I paused the ads going to my very professional and legit deals site and enable the direct link to vendor ad. Result: my keyword is back to Great $0.05 minimum bid!

Will post more as I figure out more.

But I think this is what some have refered to as the "DEAD" flag: "beg the rep to tell you any real details of what in hell you have to do to your websites to make the editorial staff remove the DEAD flag from your domains/account."

http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=90680

For reference here is another trhead about this issue:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3361782.htm

Ideas I will try:
1) make my site more obvious/cheesy. I dont like cheezy sites and wanted mine to be more classy.

2) Add nofollow to all links

3) Mask all affiliate links (idea from webmasterworld) but this appers to none probable and requires a bit of coding on my end.

4) Check my logs for google bot recent visits...

This idea is making more and more sense to me:
"I had managed to get some of my camapigns/keywords back down to 'normal levels' and guess what? slapped again! I'm not playing there games any longer, goodbye G, "
In other words if, Google does not want affiliates (even with prime content and presentation) it is not a viable business decision to continue doing business with then since they will continue and continue. MSN and Yahoo are now appearing to me as being, more sustainable.
I would add, invest your "legit" & longer term affiliate sites with MSN and Yahoo and do quick and durty sites (get domain just for product, slap page, promote) with Google. This would be pretty ironic since it's suppose to be what Google is trying to improve.

 

The slap SUCKS