Improving Google Quality Score

[eagle8]

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I know there has been a lot of blog posts about improving quality score, but I thought I would get an opinion on here:

I have been talking to google over the last few days:

"I wanted to let you know that I have now heard back from our technical specialists.

They have confirmed that the reason your minimum bids are high is that your website has a low quality score. The main reason for this would appear to be the fact that your website aims to drive traffic to xxxxxx.co.uk. Your landing page contains a number of links which lead to this website.

As mentioned, a high quality landing page is one that has a substantial amount of unique content that cannot be found elsewhere."

Obviously an affiliate site has a lot of outbound links to another site. How can you get around this issue? Reduce the amount of links overall, and just keep them in the best places with call to-action?

[moredial]

Only 2 points to take into consideration:
1. Google penalises affiliate sites
2. Google rewards sites with adwords

As a high score is closely related to high ranking, the easier option is to improve the overall page content to rank higher in the natural results and take your ppc campaign to one of the many other merchants who still work on a bid price rather than charging you more because they don't want you as an advertiser.

I know that is a simplistic view. But, if you do a leaflet distribution for £100 you know what size your ad will be, where it will be distributed and how many will be distributed. With G you give £100 and can run out before your target market have woken up.

[dougs]

Create more content on the page.....its better for google and the users...plus from our experience you can tell people what to clcik on if they are readingt he content
Doug

[Shane]

ahh bless quality score

I love how it works.. example below... ok it's not credit cards and it's not monkeys but figures are real :

site is monkey credit card orientated

"monkey credit card" is now £5.00 a click even though ctr is 9.83% and conversion is 23%

yet

"monkey credit card co uk" is 0.10p a click even though ctr is 2.1% and conversion is 3.55%


bearing in mind "co uk" isn't on the page anwhere domain is a .com

so the most relevant and best converting of the two is spanked for poor relevancy yet it's more relevant than the second which converts FAR poorer, yet is only 10p a click, the first one was around 45p a click before the Quality score spanked it.


or hows this baby for relevancy :

"monkey cards" ctr is 25% and conversion is 66.67% was 8p a click !!!! now £5.00

now just how is that "irrelevant" which is what the quality score would be inferring by saying £5.00 please .... gah

gotta love that quality score.. reckon it's named that as the guys at G sat down and said how can we increase revenue.. some nuclear fusion expert said oooo I know.. let's charge more for popular keywords and thinly disguise it as relevancy score .. someone must have just said "OMG that's QUALITY !!".. let's call it the "Quality Score" ... then they all fell down laughing.. grabbed another handfull of columbian marching powder from the fruit bowl and partied the night away on their diamond studded segways



but seriously the answer is content, and substance.. build something that's worthy of being a site in it's own right, something more than bounce in and out pages.. it's a pain but if you want to play on G you have to dance to their tune so it's best to over engineer it and go for it big stylie, at least is should (fingers crossed) be future proof for a good while then

[dougs]

They do love you Shane

Doug

[hpops]

gotta love that quality score.. reckon it's named that as the guys at G sat down and said how can we increase revenue.. some nuclear fusion expert said oooo I know.. let's charge more for popular keywords and thinly disguise it as relevancy score .. someone must have just said "OMG that's QUALITY !!".. let's call it the "Quality Score" ... then they all fell down laughing.. grabbed another handfull of columbian marching powder from the fruit bowl and partied the night away on their diamond studded segways

Brilliant!
Quality score actually does have some good effects as well - a lot of MFA sites were knocked out - and that does benefit the wider online marketing community. Having said that the implementation has been appaling at every stage and some legitimate relevant campaigns get incinerated for no good reason

[monkeyprojects]

ahh bless quality score

"monkey credit card" is now £5.00 a click even though ctr is 9.83% and conversion is 23%

yet

"monkey credit card co uk" is 0.10p a click even though ctr is 2.1% and conversion is 3.55%

I think all this actually shows is that google knows exactly how much they can get for a keyword and are using quality as an excuse to get you to pay more.

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The Rich Get Richer | PBS shows an example of what is going on but I think it boils down to:-

On unpopular items they increase rates until the bidder stops bidding. Then slowly decrease until they start buying again.

[eagle8]

Thanks guys

Will aim on improving the content & website in general

[acutts]

Is it true that google penalise iframes? I have a great quality score for every single one of my keywords, minimum bids not more than 2p but the landing page is just a header, footer, iframe application form. There is no text to scrape really, all that a spider sees on that page is the menu links.

Just find it very strange, and am awaiting a google-slapping :P