From Great Quality Score to Slap in 3 months

[tonyr]

I have a website with original content and I have been advertising some of the pages on adwords for the last 3 months. It has been working well and I have been making sales and commissions and the quality score has been mainly OK or great.

Today, all the ads have been slapped with £5.00 minimum bids.

If I do a search on some of the keywords I was advertising on, I see the merchants site and 2 affiliate sites.

One of the affiliate sites has a domain that just redirects to the merchants site through their affiliate link. They do not even have a website of their own. The other affiliate website consists of content straight from the merchants datafeed, no original content, and the website design is very similiar to the merchants.

I have tried to do things properly with my own landing pages with original content and my site gets penalised, while others who break both Google's rules and the merchants rules can carry on.

Does it ever get any easier in this industry?

Tony

[tbp]

Know how you feel, I have been talking about this on another thread.

My site that got slapped is number 1 on google, had a conversion rate of 50 - 60%, and has been fine for the last 5 months.

Tried deleting the campaign and starting again, and also pointing a different domain to the site, which has worked in the past, but no joy this time.

As a result i`m pulling out of adwords completely for the time being.

[max99]

i got hit bad like this last year, a site that was 8 months old advertising on ppc, 15p clicks all went to £5
needless to say the site went from making several k profit a month to only several hundred. weird thing was, google then put me naturally up to number 1 the following month

[tonyr]

tbp - I saw your posts after starting this thread, it's sad to see that you are stopping adwords completely. There must be some way around this for affiliates. At the moment adwords is my main source of affiliate income so it looks like I'm finished for now - (and I was only getting started!).

max99 - that was lucky! (and it shows that this whole quality score thing is far from being an exact science).

[tbp]

it's sad to see that you are stopping adwords completely. There must be some way around this for affiliates

I`ve tried all the tricks I know, but they aren't working. It's my main campaign, and going to hit me fairly hard, so i might as well just not bother with adwords if they are going to do this.

I`ll just stick to SEO instead. I still think this could be some sort of bug, but will have to see how it plays out over the coming weeks.

[bazza99]

tbp - yes, I'm sorry to hear that too. As I was saying in another thread, I've been hit by a Google slap in the past and it's pretty disheartening.

So far this time I've been lucky - maybe more by luck than judgement? - if you want to PM me details of your site then I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can suggest anything. If not, no worries and good luck

[andrewshipway]

search dvd rental on google. How on earth does a site like this: Compare the top 4 UK DVD rental services get in the top 3! Makes me wonder whether some are an 'inside job' by google adwords employees..

[bazza99]

Andrew,

I agree - it's clear that the way that the QS is calculated is bizarre.

That's an incredibly thin site and one that I'd have thought should have been picked up. However, one thing that I would say is that I believe that Google is specifically looking to target affiliate sites with its QS.

I believe that at least part of that process is manual. Since that particular website doesn't have the obvious signs (they're obvious to us but not necessarily to an Adwords quality assessor), I suspect that it's got through the net because it is not marked as an affiliate site and is hence not being tested.

This is the same reasoning that means that plenty of poor quality retailers are seeing no effects - since they are not affiliates, they are not hit by the site-wide QS in the same way.

[tonyr]

search dvd rental on google. How on earth does a site like this: Compare the top 4 UK DVD rental services get in the top 3!

My point exactly Andrewshipway.

There are several examples of 1 page websites with half a paragraph of text (if that) and 5 affiliate links who are advertised in top positions in adwords for months on end.

So you put up your original content site with privacy policy, contact details, all the usual stuff and you get slapped and the thin affiliate sites remain. Sometimes they are redirecting straight to the merchant with a different display URL, so they don't even have a site.

Ah well, if you can't beat them, join them

[andrewshipway]

what do they look for, to see if its an affiliate site? That one takes the biscuit to be honest, a few links and thats about it! They must of found a way around the quality score, some how..

[chrisuk]

I say just forget about any kind of branding on Adwords, no point, just have mydomain123x ready to roll because basically.

1. We all know QS is a bull scam
2. What is the point waiting on Google - they just send QS email spam & you lose $$$
3. New domain get back in the game - have the domains mapped and ready to go in advance, 2 sec switchover.

Ridiculous way for a top company to make you operate, like being a naughty schoolkid but needs must, you do what ever is required of you.

[aaclapham]

I lost another site today - TY google, so down to my last ppc campaign.

I could just create another throw away site however going to try the seo route

[tbp]

New domain get back in the game - have the domains mapped and ready to go in advance,

I tried this today, as it has worked in the past.

Deleted my campaign, and set a new one up using a new domain - had exactly the same problem! It seems to have cached the data for the keywords, as soon I entered them they came straight up with "inactive for search".

Not sure what to do, maybe setting up a new account will cure it, but not sure if I can be bothered, I can't keep swapping accounts if this keeps happening.

I did have a moan at google earlier, don't expect to do any good though. Had a stock response back, and then replied saying it didn't answer my questions.

[andrewshipway]

Its an abuse of position, when they don't give any customer service with the stock responses. They know it doesn't really matter, people need google now, they have a huge market share.

[tonyr]

It looks like Google is really raising the bar for affiliate sites on adwords.

All the things that people are trying are becoming less and less effective, (more relevant text on the page, more pages, privacy policies, contact pages, about pages, bigger and better sites, new domain names, new adwords accounts, etc etc).

It seems that you may be allowed to advertise for a while regardless of whether your site is a thin 1 page wonder or 50 pages of relevant, original content. It matters not, one day a few months down the road, the slap will come.

It seems to me that the more experienced affiliates on this forum are gradually moving away from PPC towards SEO. They have seen it coming.