QS turned poor, min. bid jumped!

[Don]

Tweet

Hello there

I have been using adwords for a while now, about a year. Just recently, in one of my adgroups, i've seen the minimum bid for a certain keyword jump up to a value in pounds, rather than pence. The quality score has dropped to poor, when it was previously either great or OK. I rarely ever see a poor quality score, as the landing page has been done to ensure it is relevant to what the user is looking for. I have good history with these keywords in terms of CTR etc, so don't think this should happen.

I think more advertisers are now bidding on said keyword. One thought is that one or some of them have just raised their bids very high, although from what I understood is that Adwords nowadays is not about just bidding as high as possible to get the desired ad position.

Can anybody share any thoughts?

Many thanks

[grobinso]

Hi Don, you have just been Google Slapped.
I was hit this morning, thought i would see more people reporting it in here tonight.

Search the threads in here for Google Slap and you will see its Googles way of saying 'get lost' we dont want affiliate sites. Mine went from 20-30p bids to £5 instantaneous , hundreds of keywords wiped out. Its the 3rd time now for me, and from my experience all you can do is start again with a new domain name, but expect to get slapped again in a short while, mine lasted about 5 months.

i dont think it matters what you do to your pages once you have been slapped, the domain name seems to have a 'flag' set against it at Google HQ and no amount of page re-design seems to clear it, i have sites slapped 3 years ago and still cant less than £5 bids on them. Justbuy a new domain, transfer everything over and get back to business

Google likes content rich sites,lots of pages and sitemaps. If you are running mainly single page 'landing pages" pages expect to get slapped regularly.

Anyone else been hit today ?

Graham

[KirstyM]

I've been waiting for the next Google slap for quite a while to see how my recently developed landing sites would get on, and I'm pleased to say they are all still showing QS of "excellent"

I shan't be breaking out the bubbly too soon mind you, in case it's taking them a while to get around all the accounts :td

If it helps, my sites are set up as "real" sites with substantial content. As Graham says this seems to be the way you need to set up landing "pages" for Google these days.

[eagle8]

Yeah lots of google slappage yesterday, *****

[Don]

Yeh i've seen lots of other posts about this google slap.

Incidently, the advertised website I was referring to is a full website, with plenty of regular new content etc. A decent sized site. So it doesn't look like this applies to this particular case. Also, some of my keywords are still active.

However, I did query the ones now inactive with adwords support, citing one example keyword. Their response was the usual landing page quality is poor, user experience etc. They also pointed they don't like sites that just copy content from the target retailer's website. Actually, no text on the landing page copies any content as it happens. However, I have used similar looking 'buy now' buttons, and also used the retailers logo to give it a similar look and feel to that of the target website. So I think this is why it has been given a poor quality score.

But then there are other examples on a different landing where I still cannot see why they have a poor QS. For example, the same landing page, for different keywords has a great QS on one, and poor on another!

[DannyW]

Yep, I think there's some manual reviews of thin affiliate sites going on...

My example (and I don't use adwords much, just to get real time search terms for research)

Set up a campaign 2 days ago to one page on an existing 300+ page site, lot's of ad groups and targetted ads, usual stuff - keywords etc

This started off OK/Great with bids from 3-10p then without warning went to poor and £3.50 :td

So first thing yesterday I built a sub-domain on the site from this targetted (exact same) page. This one lasted a bit longer.... until they wanted £5.00 a click - exact match keywords in the usual places (title,h1,bold,text,links) :td

I got sick of this and reg'd a new domain 24 hours ago with exact match in the domain name, used the same (95%) content, added privacy/about and bit extra, and it's doing great. Started "great" at 3p and moved to "ok" at 6p, this was my fault as the ad copy wasn't the best. Rewrote the ad copy for better ctr and it's back at "great" and 2p :tup

So I think there's a bit of flagging of domains going on at the moment.

I also noticed when the big click prices came on the subdomain no crawlers or bots had rechecked the site, so it looks at bit manual to me!

[KirstyM]

The problem with Google at times like this is that there's no "consistency" in the application of the rules. Your site will get slapped and you'll see some bit of spammy nonsense you thought would be the first to go still sitting merrily in the same place.

It makes it really difficult to work out what you should do going forward (I'm sure it's deliberate - paranoid?!).

My landing sites are all still fine, so I'll keep my fingers crossed I've cracked the QS for now.

Good luck to everyone affected, I hope you can sort it out.

[tbp]

I`m still having problems, but haven't been slapped as far as I can see.

My ad's stopped showing earlier today saying i`d exceded my budget, even though its £10 a day and so far i`ve spend 22p. Never go above £5 a day so can't see its a cumulative budget problem.

Emailed the Adwords team, but even though i`m not doing anything wrong, I hate drawing attention to my sites as they are so fickle! Normally, their adwords team is next to useless so not that confident they are going to fix it.

[grobinso]

I`m still having problems, but haven't been slapped as far as I can see.

Emailed the Adwords team, but even though i`m not doing anything wrong, I hate drawing attention to my sites as they are so fickle! Normally, their adwords team is next to useless so not that confident they are going to fix it.

I know what you mean , i try NEVER to contact support now, apart from being useless anyway the last time i did i got slapped 2 days later, i think its a mix of human and BOT action as to when you get slapped. And as for finding any logic behind it all i dont think there is any, i have had keywords that arent even anywhere on my page or advert (such as misspelt words) maintain a QS of 'great' whereas the main keywords which are splattered everywhere get 'poor' and a £5 bid.

Like ABBA sang ' Like the rollers in the Ocean, life is motion - move on'

Time to get a new domain name or build a better site, Kieron did a nice piece on designing Google friendly pages here: Google AdWords Landing Pages - how to build a page that won’t get banned, with examples

I wish i had read it

Graham

[urmall]

Yes i got slapped silly by google the other day, the second time for me, last time was about 4 months ago, only this time my two main sites got hit, one of them was spared last time! as with some other posters, they are big unique content sites that also provide invaluble information on the product, privacy pages, sitemaps etc... ctr of 15% on some keywords and we spend 5k a month with google, but we still got slapped, so i don't think it matters what you do to your site you will still get slapped, especially if you are outperforming the big boys on highly competitive keywords, which we do! Also had a phone call the other day from google in america offering to optimise my campaign for me, i said no thanks, as i didn't want them getting on to the fact that my site is an affiliate site, so that could also have something to do with it!

Ah well onto 123-reg for a couple of new domains and then to google for couple of new accounts and rewrite 100's of adverts, should be earning again by sunday!

Speak to you all again in 4 months, unless a miracle occurs and yahoo starts getting as many searches as google, then google can stick their adwords up their ar**

[tbp]

My ad's are showing again now

Didn't get any reply to my message to google yesterday, so sent another today using a different support category type.

Still haven't had any reply, but they suddenly started working again this afternoon. Pleased they are running again, but would of been nice to have had an explanation from Google as to why it happened.

Support is definately Googles weak link, its been really bad in the years i`ve been doing adwords. Had a campaign manager set up a campaign which had obvious flaws, and did my own similar campaign which beat theirs hands down. Had stroppy emails complaining I had made chargebacks and asking me to explain myself, complete with information about someone elses account (the chargebacks were for the other person, but they sent everything to me). And this is the second time i`ve contacted them and had no reply. Actually, I can't say i`ve ever had any positive outcome from their support!