Last week we got hit by the Google slap on one of our Adwords campaigns that we’ve been running for a long time. Overnight, traffic went to zero – the domain was nuked – even the content ads stopped running.
The irony is that we had just shored up the site to be better quality for both SEO and PPC. I know Google has been waging war on affiliates for a while now – so we thought we’d create better quality content and really make the site into a great resource with the end user in mind. We surveyed our users, answered their most common questions on the page, added useful outbound links to non-affiliate pages, and worked hard to make the site into something useful.
Then BAM – we got hit. I’m not sure whether it was a manual review or an algorithmic adjustment that caused our domain to tank from a 7/10 landing page quality score to 1/10 with the dreaded “below first page bid” penalty.
Our competitors in paid search have very crude and basic affiliate pages that add little value to the buying process, but they’re still running, just under different domains. I guess the name of the game is – create crap landing pages, move domains, get slapped, move again – rinse and repeat.
Our lesson has been – why spend time creating good quality content when doing so still gets us penalized? It’s sort of the opposite effect of what Google engineers intended. Instead of creating quality resources, we’re now more likely to just throw crap up and move domains every time we get slapped when it comes to our PPC efforts. As a matter of fact, we threw together a lower quality domain and quality score on the new pages is back to 7/10, even though the content is nowhere near the same quality. *sigh*
Anyone else have similar experiences?
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I just have a campaign get hit. It is total BS. Similar thing as what you described. What I find ironic is the site ranks 1st or 2nd for the keywords in search I was advertising, but AdWords says the landing page is “poor quality”. In some ways it does not matter for me if the PPC sucks, I’ll just turn it off. Most of the traffic that converts is natural anyways. Now I guess I have to wait and see if search will remain.
I was advertising, but AdWords says the landing page is “poor quality”. In some ways it does not matter for me if the PPC sucks, I’ll just turn it off. Most of the traffic that converts is natural anyways. Now I guess I have to wait and see if search will remain.
Did you ever get a reason from G as to how/why they targeted your site?
Hi i lost all my clickbank keywords that i have been using for 6 to 8 months. I also received message landing page has poor quality.I have received this little piece of info.”ClickBank are liasing with Google at the moment to try to get
full disclosure about what happened with the recent “Adwords slaps” I have lost about 300 hits a nite since a few nites ago. I have tried new key words with no success. My ads are no longer showing and have received no hits from my campaigns. Thanks for listening. Jimmy. Sorry i can’t help you i have the same problem and google is not saying a word about this problem. Its strange that all this started after paying last charge of $521.00. Keyword page now says rarely shown due to low quality score. This applys to al of my keywords that were working just fine just 2 days ago. These keywords have been used for the past 6 to 8 months with no problems. I was getting approx 190 hits per campaign per day. Quality score now shows 1/10 down from 7/10 just a few days ago. Says poor landind page quality. I’am new to this and just don’t understand how your campaign can be running great for so long and within 2 days lose all these hits and be told your ad is not being shown.When keywords were working average positsion was 5.1 which was ok with me for the amount of money per day i was spending.Thanks Jimmy P.S. i see other people have had this type of problem too. I guess that google doesn’t care about the $500.00 a month they will lose from me and other poor saps that got taken.
I hate Google. I hated Google before I read your article and I hate them even more after. We had or adsense canceled foor no reason other that it was not in the best interest of their advertisers…
Like they care.
I’ve been to the top, back to zero and now about half way back up again.
Can’t run from my domain.