Quality score gone!

[jonsp]

Tweet

Masking links doesnt stop your QS jaw dropping from 10/10 to 1/10. I have more than 20 masked links sites n with adwords on n doing great. CTR was great. Conversions-Beautiful but in the end the QS dropped to 1/10. Been reading literatures for more than 4 weeks but not a single person seems to know whats going on. Googles own financial report will sometimes be badly hit by their actions as 8 of 10 doing PPC are suffering from this syndrome. Micro site/mini site or even website with 000 of pages.

Thats one of the big disadvantages when 1 company is running a near monopolistic business.

Share your thought if you were able to revert your 1/10 to at least 5/10 without moving domains

Interesting. I'd been assuming unmasked links are the common denominator this time around. Without asking you to give away details were you promoting something G might not like offers/rebills/ebooks etc or straight retail?

As far as recovering everything I've tried suggests that once G has "blacked" a domain it's game over for that domain whatever you do. If it's a good domain you don't want to lose maybe deleting the offending campaign and coming back a while later with a new campaign pointing to a "good quality" site might work? Never tried

Cheers,
Jon

[tijan]

I have domains in every verticals you can think of. Could it be G suspending domain hosted abroad & promoting UK merchants? ..Nah! that couldnt be the case but i am 110%sure the domains are not blacked. G staff confirms a website wasnt black when i contacted them. Poor team indeed, there assistance was crap, they advice to get some better keyword despite the marriage of my Ad title, Text, keyword in destination url and detailed landing page to the thin.

[KirstyM]

For the record, when you switch domains like this you usually get around 6 to 8 weeks out of them before Google catches up with you. Sometimes you hit it lucky and get 3 months or even longer.

Also, masking links will make no difference to this - if there is something up with your landing page Google will still catch you in the end. Almost any work around you think up - they've seen it before and know how to detect it.

Really the only long term solution is to try and work out what issue Google has with your landing pages and try to improve. When I formerly had issues with QS I used the "revolving domain" technique to buy me some time whilst I designed an all new landing page / affiliate site structure. It's not an easy task, it's this almost mystical ability to "add value" and still manage to actually funnel as many visitors as possible through to your merchants.

I know quite a few people who were slapped about 3 weeks ago so clearly the QS algo trolls have been fiddling around with things. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed my own sites don't get hit next!

[jasonbuksh]

I've been badly badly stung by this - Google has given me a Quality Index of 1/10. I think its really unacceptable for google to drop rating's and not let their paying customers know specfics - everyone seems to be guessing here. Google should give more detail, and can do so without giving away IPR details. I think its nuts that you have had to change domain to get your Quality score up. Are Google turing into Microsoft? Why are they biting the hand that feeds them?

[KirstyM]

Och, if they told us it'd ruin all the fun!

Also, as someone spends a lot of time making it my business to understand Adwords QS and create affiliate pages with decent scores - it keeps the number of competitors down, so I'm thrilled

On a serious note, if they let on exactly what the QS was every man and their spammy dog would abuse the system.