I finally figured out what the "Google Slap" is.

Google doesn't like people with shady credit?

Really though, perhaps Google is more picky with high traffic keywords like that, that might lead to pages that the search engine considers sketchy.

I'm curious what your first disaster test campaign was, for it to be so far off in bid pricing from this one.

 

lol

I don't think it's high traffic keywords...to me the glaring difference is the presense of affiliate links and adsense on the landing page.

Thousands of people a day at a few cents is hardly a disaster

Could avoiding the "google slap" really be as simple as landing people at least 1 click from and easily identifiable ads/affiliate links?

 

Wow a big surprise there

why do you think 1 click, when did that start mattering to google, try any clicks.

all this tells us is that you are so far out the google chain, and that you have no advertising with your first campaign that they may never find you (although I think they will, after a while), you just got flagged sooner with this campaign..

Just to further your test, could you remove all affiliate links (ie, clean up your site), and let us know if your bids go down? I highly doubt this. I had a nice little site doing OK, and I thought, what the hell , maybe I would throw some CC's into the mix... goodbye site. It was slapped, and no the affilate links were on a sub page..

example
think "red shoes" --> then fancy red shoes --> then a nice little CC ad.... goodby shoe site even after I removed the offending CC page

 

morale: do not build niche websites.. make them as classifieds


.

 

Actually it is. I do have a few other campaigns that point to pages with ads (no affiliate links) that don't get the $10 min. I've always speculated that that the one of the primary objectives of the QS was to elminate affiliates. This "test" seems to offer some validity to that theory.

I would also think based on your previous comment, "the google slap isn't instantaneous" that you would be a bit surprised that I saw the $10 min instantaneously. That tells me "google slap" isn't always a direct result of human intervention as I've seen others speculate.

 

They have probably looked at several high paying niche markets and applied the cost to that..

Have you tried fixing the site yet, have you dropped your ppc yet?

 

Arbitrarily assigning a high min bid to "high paying markets"...I don't think that's the case either. I've worked in some of the most competitive AdWords markets out there and don't see artificially high min bids.

Nope, that's probably a month or two off. There's some cool stuff happening so I'm going to ride it out and see what happens.

 

What are you thoughts on the first comment
So what cool stuff do you see going on?

 

I'm honestly not sure what to think at this point. Even in this thread I've thrown out theories then turned around and proved them wrong. I'm going to continue to play around with few different things and if I can get a better handle on what's flipping the $10 switch.

An extermely high conversion rate with a high % of people bookmarking the site and coming back and day over day increases in AdWords traffic while holding a low average CPC. I just want to watch and see how it develops and when/if AdWords throws me a curve ball.