Is linkbuilding important for PPC Campaigns ?

Yes. And the importance of this will continue to grow in the future. For several months we’ve been teaching the first AffiliateSupportTeam students the pillars to building stable and long-term Affiliate Marketing campaigns. And link building has always been an important aspect of the traffic pillar.

As we’ve always suspected, the biggest aspect of the Landing Page Quality Score is the Domain Quality Score. From our experience the domain name quality score is measured in a variety of ways but the two most important aspects are:

• Keyword Relevancy in the Domain name
• Incoming Links (Back Links)

Google predicts that in a period of time your website will generate a certain amount of natural backlinks. If that’s not happening your site might get flagged for manual review by their spam specialist team.

In a presentation at SMX San Francisco Michael Gray said the following, according to Bruce Clay’s website:

“Michael says the Landing Page Quality Score is a lie. It has nothing to do with your landing page. It has to do with your organic rankings. The better you do organically, the better your quality score will be. Learn how to break things.

He shows us his site for Sanjaya ringtones. His AdWords ad was disabled because he had a low quality score.

He shows another site. It has the same ad copy but it’s going to a different domain. That ad runs for 75 cents. On the other site the ad goes for 10 dollars.”

You can actually do some experiments with this yourself:

• Duplicate an excising campaign
• Rename it to “Test Campaign”
• Remove all ad groups except one
• Duplicate that ad group at least 4 times.
• Make sure all the ad copy is the same
• Change the Display URL for all 4 ads
• Choose some domains you think or know have a lot of backlinks, like Google.com or CNN.com
• Upload the ads.

As you are probably shocked to see, your Dog Training or whatever campaign receives a better Quality Score on CNN.com and Google then it does on an actually related domain.

One of our students is currently experimenting with running campaigns on authority websites like Squidoo, for some small campaigns. So far his campaigns have survived the latest Google Slap.

I hope I made the importance of backlinks for your overal marketing plan, and especially search more clear..If you’re not currently building organic links to your website, do it now.