Google’s Quality Score Improvements

Yesterday, Google made a post on it’s Adwords blog about upcoming Quality Score improvements. Basically their changing two things:

Keywords will no longer be “inactive for search”

Minimum bid will be replaced by first page bid

Honestly I think replacing the minimum bid by a first page is a good move. This is likely to get you more impressions, and as far as I can tell by Google’s post, your keywords will now always run. So this might help affiliates who have been Google Slapped.

We have yet to see how the inactive for Search will turn out. Because as they say, keywords that previously were inactive for search aren’t likely to generate traffic. However, some traffic is always better than no traffic at all.

So why is Google making these changes ? Well this is a topic, definitely open for discussion, but I feel very strongly that’s it just to make money of the low quality ads as well. As they are now shifted to the secondary and even lower pages.

We’ll all just have to see how this is going to turn out, but as far as I can tell at this time. This might actually be a good improvement for most of Google’s advertisers..

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.

Got Google Slapped, now what .. ?

One of the most famous phenomenons in our industry is the terrifying Google Slap. While there are always ways you can optimize for it. Even the best of us get hit by the slap one time or another.

The problem is that one way or another, your site will get through a manual review, and we believe this is where the flag is being placed. So what should you do when you get slapped:

• Do nothing. For the first days to nothing, the Quality Score algorithm update usually takes 3-4 days and so before you can get a clear view of the damage don’t do anything.
• Register a Fresh Domain name for about 2+ years plus period
• Create a fresh Google account
• Copy your old campaigns into the new account with the Adwords Editor (But don’t upload)
• Get in the shoes of a user, and see where there’s room to improve your site.
• Check the Google Adwords Spam Guide and make necessary changes to your page
• Add a Privacy Policy, a Blog, a Terms Page, About us and Contact Us page
• Cloak or Hide your Affiliate Links
• Link to other websites in the same category/niche
• Upload your files to the new domain
• Install Google Sitemaps on your Domain
• Upload your Offline Adwords campaign.
• Resume/Activate your Campaign

As you can see slightly more complicated than just changing the new domain and up and running again in 30 minutes. Take your time to do this, and you’re good to go until at least the next Quality Score update. Perhaps even longer.

So far our affiliate mini site campaigns have remained unaffected by the current algorithm update. Strangely enough one of our direct campaigns did get slapped. We’re still investigating and will keep you posted.

Note: Our Premium members can have their sites checked by us to see if everything is in order. Contact the SEM Guru’s from the Guru’s Page.