Thanks adwordsitaly, this very good information. Not sure what this means for me personally yet, but will definitly factor this as a fact from now on. Why Google does not disclose that your site has been flag and instead makes you believe that you can improve your site by constantly repeating back the same https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47884 is a big waste of time for all. I agree very good analysis, it does fit the profile. Indeed , that is the $1M question. Since the processes of human reviews is also not disclosed, its even more difficult to deal with. Knowing how to trigger a human review would be a huge plus. At this point, for a web site appearing to have been flagged and since we do not kwow how to get sites de-flagged the only alternative appears to be creating new sites. Correct me if you think this is wrong. This appears to be very inefficient for both Google and Site Owners: ie More "unpaid" work for both. But again it would fit the pattern of inefficientness perceived by most. Thanks adwordsitaly, now if you could PM me, which Amazon book you want for your birthday and how to trigger the human review process, that would just be great....just kidding Cheers, Chris
Dynamic pages are the same as auto generated content. Not even close. I'm not. I just don't think anyone (especially searhers) wants to see all of the paid results turn into "related" ads. Useful...that could be debated. If I'm searching for an Africa Safari and I get a bunch of camera and tent ads I would not call that useful. Ok...maybe it they would be useful but a lot less useful than ads for actual safari's. You can do whatever you want, you just have to tweak your approach to fit the delivery channel, in this case Google AdWords. I completely understand your approach and think it's valid, it's all about how you structure things. Complainging about Google charging $10 click won't get the cost down. Modifying your approach will.
Hi there, I wanted to richen this thread as a guy who is from the other side of AdWords story. Few months ago I launched link removed site, most of google adsense clicks were 1-5 cents and there were days with 30 clicks and $0.5 . After searching for optimization clue on the net I found a site www.adsblacklist.com. I generated 200 blacklist domains and added it into AdSense Competitive Add Filter, and guess what … I have clicks ranging from $0.01 to $2 average 0.7 and I am happy. In my opinion this is why Google banning MFA and Affiliate LP ads. 1) THEY WANT TO RETURN THE RESPECT OF USERS and prove them that their add network is valuable and relevant. Place your self in a position of a user who is looking for a valuable info , click on add and got to this kind of page removed MFA link he will lose trust in google ads and will click much less next time …. 2) #1 is sufficient
After some tests this is my conclusion: -the domains are manually flagged -there is an automatic algorithm for the landing page quality that executes every 5 minutes or so, but this is only affecting the position of the add, relative to the other adds, it's not triggering minimum bids of 1, 5, 10 $. What we can do: -if the domains are manually flagged, you can improve the sites content and you must contact Adwords rep. to reevaluate the domain. As there is no algorithm for this flag, a slapped domain will never recover unless manually reviewed. -you can create other domain and do the same until someone is manually reviewing the new site (I don't know for how many days it will work).
Do you know how many sites advertise there are on the adword network. I think it's in the millions. How can you ever manually review millions of sites in 1-2 days ?? There are many ways to calculate an QS. I personally think they are measuring the time between the click on the ad and when that same visitor is returning. If that time is between the 1 and 5 seconds you have a site which is not appealing to the visitor. I think google is not interested in how you earn your money, but is your site what the visitor is looking for.
Hi classic, I also have adsense sites so I'm familiar with that program. I think you are a little off topic but you raise a very good point. The problem is that there is not just 2 sides, the good guys and the bad guys. Some people are penalized by Google that did not try to do anything illegit and even remotly misleading. Quality is definitly a problem for Adsense users as Fraud is for Adwords users. On Adwords you actually pay for those clicks. I don't even advertise most of my stuff on the content network because I think its too low quality for what a promote. When I first displayed Adsense ads on some of my sites, I could not believe the low quality of the ads. It was not about the money, I was thinking "how embarrasing" it was to show these cheapo ads to my users. This might be because when you start, you get the ads from the bottom of barrel? Google should definitly crack down on some sites or do better matching, but it appears you had to do it, Google did not ...makes you wonder.... I'm a little skeptic that a company, that does not care about providing service to paying customers, cares about users. Google can say what it wants about its intentions it could as well be another marketing slogan. The proof comes in the putting, on some of my keywords I can still see 1 page destination urls. A 2 year old programmer could detect that with a few lines of logic. I've also seen just 1 month ago basic arbitrage still going on with Adwords, a 1 year old programmer could detect that . So why are some getting away with 1 page landings and some brick and mortar merchants getting slapped? It doesn't make sense, technically Google could do a lot better if it wanted. adwordsitaly had an excellent post to understand the fussiness/irrational behavior we are seeing from Google:
They are able to manually review adds, so why not domains. The reviewing process was not in 1-2 days. when they finished they triggered it. Pex
On Friday I checked my account every 10 minutes. Every time I checked some keywords (1-10) turned from good --> Poor. I have an account with almost 20 different campaigns and 10.000 keywords. The process was on all affected domains the same. It started with 1 keyword then another. After 13 hours all the keywords turned to poor. I have campaigns which are affected for some keywords, they turned from good --> OK or good--> poor. If it was mannually flagged, the domains should have been turned to poor on the same time. It has to be a programm. Maybe Google is not after you !!! If it's a programm it can be a mistake. Build a new website, make it better this time more reviews and more content. I learned my lesson.
This is not new. To make it quicker, the algorithm executes on your keywords only if there is movement on that keyword. For this, at first only the "good keywords" were slapped because they were getting clicks and impressions. Also you got slapped if you edited the add or the keyword. Any change you made triggered it. But the red flag was manually added and it has a devastating effect on the algorithm when it executes. Again, the domains were flagged in time, but the flags were added on their database at once. Therefor the dramatic effect. You may have learned your lesson but there is a person who reviews your site eventually. Is your timeworth dedicated to build a very good site + the cost of a good PPC campaign LESS that what you gain? In the affiliate world, you have to advertise many products if you want to gain anything. Can you build original content for all that products? What content you will build for the "Gibby Black shoes size 41". Anyway you will gain maybe 0.50 a month from this product. So you need to advertise a lot of products. It simply not worth the time for the ROI. Of course there always be all the big engines like Amazon, Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, etc, etc. This is the way they crushed any competition. As I always said, the internet will follow the path of the real brick and mortar and eventually only the guys with big money will survive. Pex
yeah, my longest lasting and most successful campaign went from 11 cent average clicks to 10.00 minimum bid instantly. no changes on my end at all. I have about 3 paragraphs of info, some really nice images, and a professional feel to the site. sure it's a landing page for affiliate marketing programs, but its very informative. apparently that doesn't cut it anymore. now I have to wonder if maintaining an entire freaking site with pages of content for 1 affiliate ad is worth it. historically, the more links i put on my landing pages, the more customers never end up clicking the affiliate links. so, not only are my bids going up, but i have to maintain stellar freaking landing pages and lose more customers in return for more effort. not worth it to me. im switching over to yahoo and adcenter exclusively from now on - but of course, it's only a matter of time until they both do the same.
The endgame for Google is for us advertisers to completely demonetize our pages. Often it seems like nothing short of that will satisfy them.
pexcornel called it right. A good landing page should show in secondes what it's about. If your page as a 1/6 conversion but 50% of the poeple realize in seconds it's not what they want, doesn't mean your landing page is bad. This could means your page is very clear/direct and people know in seconds if they want to stay. Unfortunatly I think you are right... Some idealist might have hoped Google would use its power to actually change the way business is conducted. Make it more by the people for the people....but it does not look like this will happen. Right now I'm still working on improving my site. Then will appeal and then change domain name.
Has anyone considered that this landing page algo change might also have affected EBay in a hugely negative way? Maybe Google killed their $25-50M/quarter PPC campaign overnight with $10 min bids, and then EBay used the Google Checkout / Boston Tea Party event as an excuse to say they were turning off their Google AdWords buy to test traffic in its absence? That would help EBay hurt Google by giving lots of other advertisers the same idea (EBay is, after all, the earliest & largest PPC advertiser of all time). Hmmmm, verrrrrrrrrrry interestink.......................
It would make sense with Google's position about landing pages that eBay got also penalized. I'm starting to notice more and more how the content of sites is influenced to please Google. Yesterday I was looking for a company that can service my lawn tractor and I found this local company with a very amateurish looking weather bot on their main page... It's sad to see all the crap these little business owner add to their sites to try to get a better Google ranking. Google is encouraging "web pollution" This is probably right. But very disturbing, since Google does not recognize the "manual" flagging or de-flagging. Many people, from outside this sector, I explained the "Google Slap" to, are very surprised this is happening in America today. One of them said "obviously your competition got you removed" or "with that secrecy it's an open door to corruption"... Refusing service to someone without telling them why, so they can improve, is un-American. Someone even said, it was unconstitutional. Google is getting away with "3rd world country" type behaviors...it's probably a few lawsuits away from being "slapped" back itself. But it will probably take time since Google is very "legally clever" and "legally proactive". In the meantime I hearing more and more people that are simply deciding to stop using Google because of their business practices (most notably in the sector of privacy), like collecting your usage data for years...
Amen. People changing their websites to be more useful, great. But trying to chase Google's capricious "algorithm" is ridiculous. It's like they are out to completely kill creativity and originality. I am all for people deciding to stop using Google AdWords if they're trying to screw you. They seem to be becoming yet another big company that loses touch with the people. I don't think their bottom line is hurting, but there is no reason for anyone to stay with them and just take their nonsense. The weirdest thing about it all is, we're falling over ourselves trying to give money to them!! They work for us; if they are consistently out of touch and being unfair, fire them. To people who say "I learned my lesson! I'll get a new domain and try with Google again." Why?!? What has Google done to deserve all this effort from you? Try other services! If Google wants you to pay $10 for a keyword, and Yahoo! wants $.15, Yahoo! is obviously the way to go, even if it's far less traffic. With $10/keyword, you'll get NO traffic.
I agree LongHaul the problem is Google is becoming (is already?) a monopoly. That makes it more and more difficult to ignore Google. This article in the New York Post (03/21/07) shows that indeed Google might be trying to cut the "middle men" in the near future. Google Tests an Ad Idea: Pay Only for Results http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/b...tml?ex=1332129600&en=d2264bc7581e38eb&ei=5124... It's nearly predictable that as Google becomes more and more dominant, it will be more and more rogue to the point where it wants a sizeable chunk (20-50%?) of all e-commerce on the web. On this road one can imagine the day when Google will be The E-Commerce Store of the entities actually producing the goods. Wal-Mart v2 if you want... Google could sell directly the goods from China without affiliates, distributors making Wal-Mart nearly irrelevant... I think it's important if we care about "our internet" to indeed boycott Google as much as we can, and to explain to others why they should do the same. That's our only course of action at this point... - Try to use Yahoo Search more: http://search.yahoo.com/ - Try to use MSN Search more: http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true&mkt=en-US Change your default search engines and then use Google last. On the Adwords side make an effort to spend more time with your campaigns on MSN/Adcenter and Yahoo/Panama. Cheers, Chris
Got a nugget from Google. It's not good news but at least it's a little more direct. I'm grateful for that... Our latest email (3rd) tried to appeal the $10 slap our site got. That email was actually sent by the VP of my company. We put in 150 hours of work to improve the site.... 100% of the website was reviewed to improve the "user experience". Which now does not appear to be the issue with our site...and probably never was... I'll post the complet response in a following post, but here is the nugget: "Also, please be aware that due to the nature of website content in some cases, some websites may always experience lower Quality Scores. In these cases, such sites may be unable to further improve their existing Quality Scores." Note the use of "due to the nature of website content" which usually applies to adult, racist, violent or controversial websites... Google is now expending this meaning to anything they choose (i.e. affialites?, certain products?, certain merchants ? ...etc...). Needless to say that we now have ZERO expectations of our site being un-slapped. Cheers, Chris
Here is the full response... "Thank you for your email. If you've made changes to improve the relevance and quality of your ad text and landing pages, you can monitor your minimum CPC bid requirements to see how these changes have affected your Quality Score. As a guide, you should see lower requirements if you've significantly improved the quality of your landing page. We're unable to guarantee a timeline or any improvement to your Quality Scores should you make any changes to your landing pages. AdWords retrieves and evaluates advertiser landing pages on a regular basis, but it may take weeks or months for the system to re-evaluate your pages. If you don't see lower minimum bid requirements after making changes to your pages, you should evaluate our guidelines and verify that your changes are meaningful and substantial. Minimal or superficial landing page changes are very unlikely to result in strong Quality Score improvements or lower overall costs. To review the landing page and site quality guidelines, visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47884&hl=en_US. Also, please be aware that due to the nature of website content in some cases, some websites may always experience lower Quality Scores. In these cases, such sites may be unable to further improve their existing Quality Scores. If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at https://adwords.google.com/support to find answers to many frequently asked questions. Or, try our Learning Center at http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/ for self-paced lessons that cover the scope of AdWords. " Amazingly complex and vague answer. It's a real art Google is a master at. I'm guessing this real means: We don't want sites with affiliate links to advertise with Adwords. Cheers, Chris