mini Google slap
Submitted by Green Giant on Tue, 10/30/2007 - 15:19.
Hi all,
I've had a few of my profitable sites get a mini-slap by Google Adwords in the past week and I wanted to share some observations. I created about 20 very similar sites in July/August of this year to resurrect a campaign that was wiped out by a major Google slap in June. Each site promoted a distinct product using a specific URL.
This past week, all of the sites created in July were hit by a mini-slap, that is, the click prices rose from 10-20 cents to a minimum bid of 50 cents. This is not a typical slap where the prices skyrocket to $10.00. However, all of the sites created in August were not affected.
Does anyone know what's happening here? I'm guessing there's something in the Google algorithm that looks at the date of site creation? Some of the sites created in July were not updated since July. Others were updated in September and October. Yet all of the sites created in July were hit, and none of the ones created in August were.
Has anyone experienced such a mini-slap and been able to get the the quality score back to "great"? I should add that each of these sites was put together meticulously using the advice I learned from Jeremy at Affiliate Summit which is pretty much the same as what can be found in his Unofficial Guide to Quality Score.
Thanks in advance,
Mike
mini Google slap
Did your CTR go up or down during this time? Did you make any adjustments to your bids?
Run a keyword performance report before and after the mini-slap and let me know. I have a few working theories, but need more information before offering advice.
Best,
Jeremy
mini Google slap
My CTR remained fairly constant and was between 8% and 18%, depending on the site. I may have made a bid adjustment to a handful of individual keywords in some of the ad groups. All of the keywords in each group were affected, for the sites affected. One thing I did do was pause the entire campaign over a weekend when I ran out of money to fund it. When I turned it back on, the result was as I described above. Could this pause have triggered a manual review?
Mike
mini Google slap
I experienced a mini-slap as well on the weekend of the 20th. As I reported on another thread, these were sites with a lot of content built to the specifications for avoiding slappage*.
I made adjustments to keywords as well, turning on some keywords that were paused in one campaign and eliminating all keywords with less than a 1% CTR in another. These sites have been running successfully for almost a year.
*Trademark pending :D
Same here
The google gods just raised my bids to 5.00/ 10.00 - quality score poor.
These keywords had a quality score of "great" and CTR above 20%.
The only thing that changed was i overextended myself, and my ads were paused for the past 3 days. I turned them back on yesterday.
Any suggestions?
mini Google slap
I looked at my account this morning, and the mini slap has turned into a regular slap. All sites in the campaign disabled due to $5.00 or $10.00 minimum bids.
After following the advice in Jeremy's quality score guide book, I really feel like I have followed it quite closely on these sites. Of course, I'll be making some new sites to replace them, but I wonder how long it will be until these ones are slapped also?
Is anyone else here having issues with quality score lately? Fortunately, my Yahoo and MSN campaigns are still running and are still profitable.
I'm thinking that starting some new campaigns and sticking to Yahoo/MSN only might be better worth my time than continuing to create new sites at Google for this campaign...
Mike
mini Google slap
I couldn't agree more Mike. The time that is wasted on trying to figure out why your site that conformed for months is now penalized, shifting sites to other domains, and restarting PPC campaigns doesn't seem worth it.
As Jeremy mentioned in his last newsletter most of his revenue is coming from Yahoo and MSN. Google just doesn't seem worth the hassle anymore.
mini Google slap
Yes, but fortunately I have been largely able to get around it for all my seriously profitable keywords/campaigns. It requires continuous work though... but I don't really have a choice here since I just don't get anywhere near the same sales volume through YSM/MSN.
mini Google slap
What type of continuous work are you doing to keep the slaps away?
John T
mini Google slap
This is just recent news links. Have no idea if this helps or not.
http://domainnamewire.com/2007/11/09/google-slap-hits-developed-domains/
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-confirms-paid-links-google-pagerank-update/5906/
mini Google slap
Moving the affected campaign to my PHP LP framework (which per default has a lot of content), then adding 5-10 pages of relevant content again, registering a new domain, copying all the stuff to a new campaign... and if all that doesn't help, to another account.