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

It's happened to me as well. Top position to 2nd page overnight, although all my kwds are showing 'Great'. I have a quality landing page and nothing to do with adsense or affiliate links - just my own product. Perhaps google is simply trying to get us to increase our bids.

For a long time now I've been worried that I have to rely almost totally on google for my business - that sucks.

 

Definitely agree with you, since Google seems to have established it arbitrary nature and see not wrong in doing so. Any thinking business needs to factor that fact into its plans. You can and probably will be shut down in the future, it's a matter of time.
At the extreme end of this path/logic, Google will want all commissions from all sales on its network (why share when you can have it all?). Google checkout could be one of the steps in that direction. We are probably years away from that and Google can't go too greedy too quick...so we probably still have years of "cat and mouse" games we can play with Google.

Meanwhile I'm trying to get my stuff back on Google, so back to work.

I'm probably going to work on masking the affialite links after reading this:
"People haven't masked all their affiliate links yet? Geez no wonder you got smoked, that was news months ago. If you continued running affiliate links directly, then it's no big shocker that you go zapped this time around. "

I had no clue we had to hide from Google that we are affialites. Technically Google could as easily follow the local link directing to the vendor link...

 

You got slapped Harrison?
damn

 

From my past experience, I have been slapped by google damn hard, I lost 1k in 1 day.Then I found out, in certain extend, I dono how and dono why, advertising on landing page on adword depends on the merchant web page to cut down the click cost, meaning what you promote muz be relevent to the merchant sales page.BEware, better check the merchant sales page and other info about it before creating your own landing page and advertise on adword. How is it chrisd?

 

I don't think they made a mistake at all. I've had many lengthy discussions with Google about this and basically if you have any type of landing page site then Google don't rate it as a quality experience for the user. However please feel free to PM me the site so I can give you some further info.

 

do any one have solutions to this issue ??? i lost 90% of my keywords.

 

Thanks pm sent.

Don't have a solution yet but I got
- nofollows done
- I adding a banner on top to make it look more cheesy

I'm going to work on a filter to add a level of indirection in the instances where I actually direct link to vendor.

I'm still hoping that this mistake will be corrected in the next few days.

I also got a few other thing I will try before switching domain.

- Change IP ? Would that help ?
- Change some of the registration info on my domain ? Would that help ?

I also got plenty of ideas from technical perspective to strategies.

On a side note I think one of these days Google should get sued for this type of behavior. Google has been in many courts of the countries where it is present. I know mostly of the US and French court cases. In France it was (it's still going on) challenging the established trademark/brandname laws arguing that it was a private system and that any "term" and the way they are used/linked is beyond its control or the purpuse of its service. In other words they have no accountability (private system, you are free not to use it) and no "strict" trademark policy since the system match "automatically/blindly" words to links. Brilliant! I liked that 21st century thinking...enough of compagnies "owning" all the words in the dictionary and controlling what we see if we type the words they own in some entry field on a form.
I've pretty much always supported Google for innovating establised practices using the courts. But now I realize how one sided that is...
I got no warning, no appeal process, no clue of why they accepted money from me for months and suddenly refused to serve my ads.
Some made it threw the slap, is this some kind of preferencial threatment, racist? are they using the color of my web site to accept or deny service. Are they favoring the "older" customers or the one that spend more then others ? We will never know and that's not right. I pretty much spent $15,000 (fake number) last month with Google and they now refuse service, letting me try to figure out why, this is more "royalist than the king" himself...

Anyway back to work got some php to write...

 

Guys, I can tell you it has NOTHING to do with masking affiliate links... By the way, all my campaigns are Affiliate stuff, I have no Ads or whatever on my pages...

One of my biggest campaigns got GSlapped and ALL my keys got disabled with minimum bids ranging from .40 - 5.0 , all links from my LP were masked trough .htaccess, another of my campaigns isnt affected at all and I just framed the affiliate page on this site...

 

I don't believe it has anything to do with affiliate links either, I have a campaign running with around 20 adgroups, approx 15 exact match keywords with 1 ad in each.. all linking direct to merchant via an affiliate url. Every single keyword in every adgroup is Great $0.01.

My landing page sites with moderate --few paragraphs-- relevant content and 5 or less links to other areas of the site have been hit slightly. There really is no logic to it. "key word" gets Poor, [key word] gets Great, ridiculous.

 

This is exactly why Google has "slapped" you. You have a landing page, simple as that.

Google does not like landing pages, its as simple as that. They view any landing page whose only purpose is to direct visitors onto a merchant as poor quality. It is that simple.

So masking affiliate links, putting banners on the page to make it "cheesey" (I mean who on earth said that?) and so on will NOT help.

I've had loads of PM's asking me what for some more advice and tips, so will post some more soon.

 

So if a direct merchant like gieco has a simple landing page, and it does, http://www.geico.com/landingpage/go5.htm, it's fine because they are selling their own product?

But if an affiliate for gieco makes similar landing page, it's not? Even when the affiliate landing page is part of a larger relevant site with good information?

So google is in effect penalizing affiliates and giving the merchants a huge advantage. (not to mention trademark protections).

The consumer is looking for a free insurance quote, so all the content just gets in the way. The affiliate has to do "reviews", "comparisons", or whatever for content, which will no doubt dilute their ctr.

Not that this is a bad thing. I can see where google doesn't want just a ton of "get a free quote" type pages, but adwords is about advertising. Whoever writes the best ad wins. Just my opinion.

 

Exactly. In their zeal to blur the line between the ads and the organic results, G forgets that us people along that righthand margin and top need to make money. I believe it's fine for there to be a difference between ad results vs. an organic results. I have plenty of sites floating in the organic universe, and I'm happy with a less aggressive, more meandering approach to leading users toward my contextual ads or aff links.

But the minute you start advertising, the clock start ticking. You need to take a more targeted approach to leading users to take an (eventual) money-making action. AdWords costs mount very fast. Time is of the essence. Users spend seconds--not minutes--on your site. This is not an altruistic business; not a charity.

 

Yes you are correct.

I'm going to play Devils Advocate here, from Google's point of view if a user where to search for say "geico car insurance" and were presented with an ad from Geico themselves then maybe 10 affiliate ads all with similar simple landing pages then that is not a good user experience. Especially as the user just wants to get to the Geico site, so why let all these affiliate pages get in the way?

Do you see my point? If you have a landing page which has no other point of being in existance other than to send a user to a merchant then Google sees it as pointless. It really is that easy.

Anyway, I've put more detail in my post here.

 

Well if you are right, lets just throw all the affiliate industry to the garbage.
If your logic is correct, then if a user searches for "geico car insurance" what the f**k are those 1,370,000 pages doing in the Google results if only one is relevant?
Why don't you just let the user decide what is good and what is bad.
Soon the algorithm will decide for the user just one result that is relevant. Who will pay the 100$/click that they will ask, will get the spot.
That is the new internet )

 

I pretty much did every thing I said I would.

- Added a little banner on top, just to make the purpuse of my site clear...
Kieron I'm using the word cheesy/ for a lack of better word. What I mean is filling the void. Many sites in my market fill the screen with clutter. To differenciate myself from some of my competition (which has not been "slapped") I wanted a simple, clean minimalist design (no ads...etc..). Now since they have not been slapped I'm think maybe I need to look more like them...time will tell...

- Add nofollow to all outgoing links

- Put in place a filter to redirect aff. links. I actually have to set a type on my old record for this filter to active, most had the record "type" set so probably half my links are now "redirects".

- Change IP to different class c

- Change some of the registration info on my domain

Next step respond to Google asking to review my case.

 

Chris, all of these little changes (like adding a banner) will make zero difference. I looked at your site and there just isn't any original content. That is your problem.

Follow the steps I outlined in my other post and then get Google to review it. There is no easy fix though, you need to put a lot of work into it.

 

I agree with you pexcornel . Most of the brilliancy of Google is that organic way of letting information flow based on popularity and not by the decision of a man or a team of people. A sort of democratic way to let the "people" decide what is relevant or not. Sometimes it seems that Google is slow moving away from its "good old ways".

I hope Google is not moving in the direction were huge compagnies will control the single ad displayed (ala AOL). Eventually leading to a control and censorship of even the organic search results.

When I started to understand what this affialite business was about, I got very exicted. I perceived it nearly like a continuation of the "internet revolution".
Letting 1000s of little "marketing mercenary" (that's the way I like to call our activity, since we are all small entrepreneurs taking risk with our own money) find the best way to make relevant contacts between customers and products. Instead of a few people at huge monopolistic fortune 500 compagnies deciding with their huge F500 customers what ads and products they will show with the huge F500 media groups.

Affialite marketing fits perfectly with the initial Google philosophy. The philosophy that made Google great. Let the people decide what is relevant or not. What if pexcornel has a brilliant idea for connecting a product/service to a particular search and a stupid bureaucrat from his office decides that it's irrelevant. Who is he to know better then pexcornel putting his own money on the line.

Now agreed Google could do some cleanup. For exemple, on one of the keywords I had purchased (paying $2 clicks) someone also purchased an ad lower (<.20c) that simply displayed nearly the same search results page with my ads also on it (primitive arbitrage). If you advertise regularly you find tons of sites like that.

In my case I approched my site with a genuine honest intention to serve my customers. Right now it does not look good with Google and I understand better, why we see more and more of the 3 or 4 product sites (all with affiliate links) in some sort of ranked review probably based on the commisson amounts.

I most likely will continue my project with MSN and Yahoo and for Google I will feed it what it accepts: Questionable review sites each with their own domain name so if they get slapped it's no biggy since you can feed it dozens of these types of domains. This is another example of what can happen when I few people decide for the many. Google could endup with more and more 5 page sites very professional looking but with very little or even no genuine value.

Cheers,
Chris

 

Thanks for the feedback Kieron. I agree with you and I take it as a compliment. My site is a coupon/deals site. When I look for a coupon, I'm not interested in any charades or even orignal content. So are the people using my site.

When you get your Sunday paper and reach for the deals & coupons section their isn't any "orginal content". Just stock pictures of the products, a label prices or discounts...

My site aims to provide the same service online. Not to blindly create original content that none of my customers are looking for, simply because Google dictates it.

Anyway thanks again for taking your time to look at my stuff.
Cheers,
Chris

 

Chrisd.
As of yesterday I put some 100 new ads, done by hand, in Panama and Adcenter and left Adwords out. And I will continue to do so. I lost 50% of my income but I sleep better at night.
I refuse to do any modifications of my pages that ALWAYS converted very very well.
They preach: build your site for the user not for the search engines. Thats what I do. I found what works for conversion and its working.
Tomorrow I'll go all day to the Auto Salon in Barcelona to see some girls and some new cars )

 

Well I have a campaign which used to perform really great in the last 3 months... its perfromance was great with a an average CTR of 8% and has reached 16% in the last few days. My landing page directs my user to the action but the other parts of the website is really useful. The weird that has happened yesterday that my Quality score became Poor... It used to be great... I used to pay 0.05-0.10 cents and now google asks me to pay 0.5$. I can't understand that google used to be dump in the past and all of a sudden they became smart yesterday. Am talking about a huge shift in performance. And I provide what the users are looking for since I Have a great conversion rate. Absolutely great....
My competitors websites that are still showing are really crappy in most cases. I think the google engineers need to review their code/ their algorithm. Not bc I don't like it... just bc it is not common sense at least in my case. I dont know what and how did this affect others but I am the wrong person to be affected. I don't know what would happen if google can tell us what part of my page has caused the low Quality score. I contacted google support team yesterday... And I have to say their support team sucks... I love this great company but I wonder how did they employ any of them.