Google Responds To My Request For a Landing Page Review

AEIOU/Google Boy wrote:

Really? Putting them on the right side, on the other side of a vertical rule, and writing "Sponsored Links" above them isn't denoting them as ads? What more do they need to do?
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You're obfuscating: The issue isn't the FORM of advertising or its delineation. The issue is that, according to you, Google should be able to act differently than other media do. I gave an example of a newspaper, and stated that it would be sued if it told some businesses it would cost 100X more for them to advertise than their competitors are charged. (Especially if the paper didn't specifically tell the advertiser WHAT they did that caused their ad rates to be raised.)

The POINT IS: Other media do not judge the "quality" of the customer's experience when he or she deals with the advertiser. They cannot charge more if the business is not in a good neighborhood, has peeling paint, etc. Google believes it can do this, and I think that is just plain unethical and likely illegal. It is certainly discriminatory.

It is not up to the MEDIUM to determine whether its viewer's/reader's/user's experience with an advertiser is relevant or of a certain quality (according to quality standards it will not fully reveal). A medium can certainly refuse to accept advertisements which don't meet its quality standards, or from businesses which they have a policy against (such as porn stores), but they cannot arbitrarily charge more to some advertisers than they do others in the same industry based on what they perceive to be the customer's experience. Doing so would not, frankly, ever hold up in court.

So why is Google supposed to be exempted from the restrictions applied to other media?

 

I don't really think all the name calling in this thread is necessary. I believe this is a valid discussion with good points on both sides. Trash talk doesn't really help. As a disclaimer, I have only dabbled in AdWords and have not been impacted by this new policy. I just think the issues are interesting and worth discussing.

I believe websites (including Google) have the right to choose what they publish. They have the right to accept or decline advertising. They have the right to demand advertisers meet certain guidelines. They have the right to control the user experience.

I see two reasons why people are upset here:
1. Google is not simply accepting or declining an advertiser. They are charging different advertisers more or less for the same product.
2. Google is using unpublished criteria to choose who has to pay more and who has to pay less. Unlike the ad quality score, which is just math, the landing page quality score is a black box that gives you a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down without any specific explanation about where you failed.

Earlier in this thread there was discussion about who is a customer and who is not. In this case, the advertiser is the customer and no customer wants to pay $10 for something that costs the guy next to him 10 cents. When you are told your money is no good, but you are not told why, it is upsetting. Airlines and auto dealers practice this same kind of variable pricing so it is obviously legal, but it does seem arbitrary and unfair to the people impacted. I am not a lawyer, but I believe it only becomes illegal when the reason for the price difference is due to race, sex, age, religion, etc.

I think the reason many people are saying, "Hey wait a minute!" to this new policy is because, like it or not, Google controls this market. If you are forced to choose one of the other games in town you are missing some 90% of the market (I read that stat somewhere and can’t vouch for its accuracy). Google has done their job so effectively that they are approaching monopoly status in the search arena. As soon as a single player gets this powerful they face anti-trust concerns and then they do have to play by different rules. Are they there yet? I don’t think so, but this level of buzz means that they are getting pretty close.

I think the questions that remain are:
1. Is Google getting so powerful that they need to play by a different set of rules?
2. Could they have achieved their quality goals in a less disruptive manner?
3. Will they be improving the transparency of their landing page quality algorithm in the weeks to come?
4. Do publishers need to accept the fact that they chose to do business in an industry with low barriers to entry and high vendor power?

 

What an awful admission - if I ever commissioned someone to write me an article and then found out they had actually spent less than two hours writing it I would be absolutely appalled. I would certainly never buy another one. Surely the RESEARCH alone for my article would take more than two hours let alone the writing!!??

jeeeez its not surprising there isso muchrubbish out there if article "providers" are just churning it out too.

 

I've enjoyed reading all of the posts here.

I am a 65 year old grandmother who had a pizza making course on the Google search network that was doing extremely well. Multiple sales every day and tons of glowing testimonials about my product.

Google coming down on 1 pages sales letters is utterly ridiculous. Sales letters have been selling products from the beginning of time. In fact Internet marketing experts TEACH people how to successfully sell via one page sales letters.

Obviously Google's quality checker is in need of a serious redesign. If you wish to see my "low quality" sales letter you can view it at http://www.PizzeriaSecrets.com. Nice page, nice design, well written, embedded video. Yes, surely low quality...

It's a sad day for Google when they are allowing computer algorithms to determine what is quality and what is not. In my case it seems to me that:

1) I can no longer make money selling my product on the Google search network

2) My customers can no longer find the product they were looking for (I was the only pizza making course on the entire Adwords system)

3) Google no longer collects the click money they used to be getting.

How sad. Numerous complaints to Google have done nothing but resulted in numerous copy and paste reponses back to me that had nothing to do with my scenario.

If anybody who works at Google is reading this, tell your folks that 1 page sales letters can have terrific quality. Sadly, man marketers are now out there trying to make their 1 page sales letters look more like web sites in order to get unbanned from Google. Effectively they are now out there "junking up their sites" with content that isn't necessary. All in an effort to obtain a better Google quality score.

DOES THIS MAKE ANY SENSE FOLKS? In numerous cases this is having the exact opposite effect of what Google wanted. Rather than sitting up there on their high horse, hopefully somebody at Google with a little sense will starting listening to their paying, loyal customers.

Me? I'm not changing my beautiful landing page that has worked so well for me all these months and resulted in so many delighted customers. I'll wait for Google to make the right decision instead.

Beverly Collins
http://www.PizzeriaSecrets.com

 

I too have just spent a week trying to get answers out of Google as to why they penalized my site. They initially accused my site of being an affiliate site. Once it had been explained that we were not an affiliate site, they then started coming up with all sorts of other excuses.

Having listened to all these other reasons, I quickly realised that no one at Google actually understood how my business (loan Broker) actually functioned. I questioned the customer care person that I was speaking with about whether or not the policy makers that are making the decisions about which sites get penalised were English (I operate in England UK) or could in fact actually speak English. It transpired that the people actually responsible for making the decisions were based in California. This concluded that I was right. They have penalised me for actually running my business legitimately, due to the simple fact that they have no understanding of how a loan broker operates under English law.

They have, however, failed to penalise many of the other advertisers in my niche, that are known in our industry as 'Introducers' or affiliates, simply because Goggle think they are someting other than they really are.

In summing up the stupidity of the conversation that I had with Google, it would appear that if I rewrote the content of my site to make it look like we are something that we are not, ie tell lies, and purport to be something that we are not, we would get a better quality score.

In their efforts to give users a better experience, all Google have done is removed several legitimate advertisers and left the frauds to have the last laugh as they are getting better CPA results now some of us have stopped advertising with Adwords.

Well done Google, you have really ballsed this one up.

 

Here is a free case study about how one person cleaned up their poor quality landing page.
http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/google-adwords-case-study-improving-landing-page-quality/

There is another case study/article at http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3622950. But that one is for members.

Hope it helps.

 

So, what they aren't saying but are implying is:
"However, we are willing to forgo that goal as long as you pay us enough money by increasing your bids."

So can anyone speculate why google has increased our minimum bids to 10.00? Here is the url to our landing page: http://www.seniorlifehealth.com/productcart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=15&idproduct=12
It has plenty of content, no adsense ads, all of our keywords, etc. Almost all of our ads have gone up to $10.

Mike

 

I just heard about this forum and love the site and the tools! Great stuff -

anyways, I too got penalized by the big "G" for poor landing page quality.
I went back and forth with Google and became quite frustrated when dealing with them on my keywords and their new bid prices of $5 or $10 each....

Here is copy of the last email I got from an Adwords specialist, and I quote.......

"Hello Steve,

Thank you for your email. I've confirmed that the quality review of your
site was correct, and that your current landing page quality is very poor.
Sites that don't include useful content, products, and/or services for
internet users are often difficult to advertise efficiently and
effectively.

Based on user feedback, we've found that low quality sites lead to a poor
user experience, and unhappy users are less likely to click on AdWords
ads. Also, advertisers with quality sites see higher advertising costs
when they are forced to compete with ads for poor quality sites. AdWords
provides the best results when both users and advertisers have a positive
advertising experience.

According to our review, http://www.your-high-school-musical.com is a poor
quality page and will continue to cause higher minimum bid requirements
for you, and potentially low return on your investment. Therefore, AdWords
may not be the online advertising program for your website or business.

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.

We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising
available.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team"


I found the statement "Therefore, AdWords
may not be the online advertising program for your website or business." rather offensive and arrogant on their part. They will probably need to update the 2nd paragraph on the Adwords home page which currently reads:

"With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to help us match your ads to your audience and pay only when someone clicks on them."

To something like: "With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to help us match your ads to your audience and if we (Google) think your landing page is of high enough quality we will display your ads via our network and then you will pay only when someone clicks on them. "

Here is one other quote I got on a different email response from Google: "The best way to figure out whether your keyword, ad, or landing page is
relevant and useful is to put yourself in the shoes of a user. Do your ad
and landing page include language that makes sense in the context of the
keywords you've chosen?"

Here is one of my ads:

High School Musical
Everything High School Musical!
Shirts, Lyrics, Singing Lessons
Your-High-School-Musical.com

I even have one that take the user directly to our shirts area - how much more targeted can you get? I guess I am frustrated in that I started out just selling the CD for this musical with my son via Amazon and we have added so many other things - but Google still wants to run adds for people advertising just the CD. I guess I will re-read the FAQ on improving my landing page and I will add additional content but come on....my site isn't terrible, the thing that got me upset was other "link type sites" that were still showing up that had zero relevant content. My personal opinion is this - the algorithm is buggy and the Adwords specialists are overwhelmed with support issues - it took nearly 5 days for a response this last time...oh well I hope it shakes out.

I wish everyone well in their endeavor to thrive economically doing business on the wonderful world wide web.

Steve

 

"Thank you for your email. I've confirmed that the quality review of your
site was correct, and that your current landing page quality is very poor.
Sites that don't include useful content, products, and/or services for
internet users are often difficult to advertise efficiently and
effectively."

So is it the landing page or the site that is poor?

I've found that advertising venues that raise rates 10x or more and call my business a poor user experience leads to a unhappy user who is less likely to advertise on said venue. lol

But if it cuts down on MFA's ... alls good.

 

Indeed! "Made for adwords"-sites are the new big thing.
If the google ad bot wants content I'll give it content.

I launched a new site last week, and 95% of the pages are meant for the google ad bot only.

 

:: Hello ::

I am starting to see $10.00 minimums in many client accounts. The landing pages are fine, also I have seen letters from Google stating that thier "End users" make recomendations concerning design.. I thought the AdBot was scraping these pages for content not end users? So which is it?.. And what do they deem quality? The pages I am seeing are fine, to the letter concerning thier editorial suggestions..

Has anyone used the AdBot exclude script? What was the damage concerning the minimum CPC quality score?



Google: "While we strongly recommend against restricting our system's automatic review of your landing page, you can edit your site's robots.txt file to avoid a review. The file must explicitly exclude your page from our system visits as follows:

To prevent AdsBot-Google from accessing your site, add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /
To prevent AdsBot-Google from accessing parts of your site, add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /exclude/

Where exclude represents the directories you don't want the AdWords system to visit.
Note: In order to avoid increasing CPCs for advertisers who don't intend to restrict AdWords visits to their pages, the system will ignore blanket exclusions (User-agent: *) in robots.txt files."

 

If this was actually true, there would be no ebay adverts EVER on any search term for google search because Ebay has never provided users with a good experience in terms of landing page quality.

It could possibly be users are now refusing to click on adwords adverts because of the way Google has determined their site to be low quality landing page combined with the realisation on how much it can cost some advertisers if they have failed Googles' ambiguous quality guidelines for landing pages.

As clearly evident in a previous post - Google do not know how a loan broker operates under english law and as such favoured the 'affiliates' over the loan broker... clearly the advertiser (loan broker) is not having a good experience if he is having to pay 100 times more than an affiliate site that was thrown together in a few minutes and contained 'filler' or 'junk content' to meet an ambiguous quality guideline.

 

If a page is low quality in content but 100% what the user is looking for. Why and how can it be possible than a less relevant content be deemed more to what the end user wants?

Makes no sense. A page of just an image and a buy now buton of a Pink Gorilla Suit is more relevant to an end user looking for it than a content of rubbish he is not interested in.

Crazy thinking by google.

 

Google like to solve things via algorithms rather than labour intensive human reviews. It is very easy for them to determine the 'usual characteristics' of what constitutes poor quality. However, the problem is that quality means different things to different people and therefore the algorithm is programmed with a closed mind of people who contributed to its development.

It may be effective for the majority of the cases (50%+), but will definately not cover 100% of possibilities, especially if the person who then reviews the site is unaware of how a specific market operates and what constitutes quality in that specific marketplace.

 

Thanks. I suppose we have to accept that quality is purely based on the interpretations of however displays results, or adusts goal posts to suit.

Whether right or wrong, it is the "guessing" of what is regarded as content that is more importand than actual content. Guess correctly, you are in, guess wrong, you are out. Simple as that.

 

The only argument is that you were mislead when you signed up.

 

<<I called last Friday and asked for a manual review of my site. My site basically asks for the user to fill out his preferences regarding new housing in a metro US location and promises to connect him with a real estate agent who will send a daily email with all of the relevant home listings based on what he puts on the form. I have a CTR of about 8% averaging about 6th - 8th position. I have a conversion rate of 23-24%. I have been advertising for 2 years and have spent in excess of 30,000 over that time with Google.>>


So in your request for a "landing page review" what would have been a positive outcome, what could Google have done for you differently?

 

Sad but true.

 

So does google offer individual site reviews now..?

 

I've had the exact same problem, getting CTR of 5.2% conversion rate of 10% thousands of satisfied customers from just one keyword, then the price got jacked up to $10, I'm now going through the process of testing different variables to see if I can get a lower CPC, the only way I've managed to make some headway on this issue is by creating a new Google Account with a different Credit Card. I'm now at least able to test different elements for the keyword and Google will display my Ad for a couple of hours before slapping it back up to $10.