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Google to penalise slow landing pages by Matthew Wood

Posted in Affiliate Marketing on 05/03/2008 at 10:52pm

It may be time to order that server upgrade or tweak those heavy, slow loading landing pages used for arbitrage or other affiliate led campaigns.

Not only will they hurt your conversions but it appears that Google are set to penalise landing pages which are slow to load giving them a lower Quality Score and hence a higher minimum bid price in an effort to improve the user experience.

The change could mean that affiliates conducting direct to merchant CPA search activity could have campaigns affected where for once they have no direct control over their quality score and consequently their campaign perormance.

To recap the Quality Score set for an affiliate or any SEM is determined by a combination of many factors including a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your accounts historical performance and your landing page quality.

The landing page quality can be overlooked. Google bots reguarly visit landing pages attempting to determine relevance, uniqueness and quality. They look at how many links are on the page, how you use those links and how easy your site is to navigate.

"The quality of information collected will affect your account performance in the future. Landing pages with useful, informative content related to your keywords and ad text are considered to be of higher quality and will receive higher quality scores. This may mean lower minimum cost-per-click bids (CPC bids) for your ads. (The inverse is also true - poor quality landing pages will receive lower quality scores.)"

Adwords users will shortly see a load time grade for each keyword and its associated landing page, either; This page loads slowly or No problems found.

If you get the first message don't panic here are some tips from adwords on how to decrease your load time:

  • Use fewer redirects.
  • Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
  • Do not use interstitial pages.
  • Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.
  • Contact your webmaster or webhosting provider to discuss other ways of improving your website's load time.

I'm also hoping Google give adequate allowance for affiliate network and other tracking redirects in their alogrithm.

If you do get a penalty Google say that they will regualry send a bot to your landing page (around once a month) and its possible your GQC will improve over time.

You can find a wealth of information over at the Google adwords help centre

If you spend any money on adwords, I thoroughly reccommend you spend time to read it!

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12 Comments

  • Comment added by Qui Gon Jinn on 06/03/2008 15:37:36
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    Another nice blog Matt. However is there an never ending abyss to reasons Google can come up with to pump up the minimum bid requirements & then spin it relevancy & user experience.

    Whatever next will they come up with to increase minimum bid. Pink? "Sorry Mr Advertiser but the quality score has been reduced because you have pink on your site, therefore we are whacking you with a £5 minimum bid"
  • Comment added by Ronny Raichura on 07/03/2008 11:33:36
    Cynical ploy to increase revenue or true enhancement of the user search experience? Probably a bit of both and could actually improve the user experience as long as it is enforced indiscriminately.

    Why is that Ebay can appear on completely irrelevant terms such as 'frozen embryo' and not be hit by a high minimum bid, but other advertisers have to pay astronomical min bids for 100% relevant terms
  • Comment added by Andy on 07/03/2008 11:49:41
    Nice informative blog, isn't it funny how much we hear google mentioning "user experience" and "relevency" yet they allow 5 adverts all pointing to amazon for the same keyword and product, no matter how much you complain they just ignore you, because they are making money out of them! Hippocrates!
  • Comment added by Maddy on 07/03/2008 13:16:48
    I like your suggestion. 10xs for this suggestion. I remember it.
  • Comment added by MattSweet on 10/03/2008 19:06:32
    User avatar
    Is it just me or is Adwords itself very slow to use? Hmmmmmmm

    Good posting - there is certainly plenty to think about at the moment...
  • Comment added by AttractionTix on 11/03/2008 15:14:25
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    I tend to agree there is a hint of money grabbing going on here, but I also like this idea. For well written sites on reasonable hardware you have nothing to worry about.

    I was also in favour of their other recent change to give a quality score to the landing page based on W3C standards etc.
  • Comment added by ep90 on 12/03/2008 07:11:02
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    You can also use Google's Webmaster Tools to graph the average download time for your site:

    1) Sign in to Webmaster Tools with your Google Account login
    2) Click your site if you see it on the page. If not, type in the URL of your website in the Sites field and click Add Site.
    3)Select Tools in the sidebar.
    4)Click Set crawl rate. Note that you'll need to have verified your site before you can do so.
    5)The third graph will show your site's average load time.

    My average is 1.2 secs so I'm hoping that's fast enough.
  • Comment added by AffiliateMarketingUK on 14/03/2008 17:51:52
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    I think it’s a good thing. It will improve user experience. Don’t know why people are moaning as there landing pages should be fast anyway.
  • Comment added by # one slev on 20/03/2008 16:23:31
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    It would be interesting if direct 'VeraciTag' from AF is affected by this. I see people have said (and I have noticed too) it takes longer than before to get the the destination...

    Google states: 'the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad.' - so I would presume PPC via AF will be more expensive!?
  • Comment added by cloudnine on 20/03/2008 23:02:34
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    I think Google are starting to lose the plot! Still I think it's time to remove all those big files from my landing page [smiley]

    Joe
    www.fourthewin.com
  • Comment added by TVIDesign on 31/03/2008 20:40:37
    User avatar
    I agree, I can only see this as being a good thing.

    I have suspected this for a while and we pay a fair amount to make sure we have good hosting.

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