My First Major Google Slap
Submitted by zoeyzoo on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 21:28.
I finally found a profitable niche for me. Just started making money, not a lot only profited $12 but I felt it was a great start. It looked promising. Two weeks worth of website developement and keyword research and now all of my minimum bids are $1.00. I only Had 44 clicks. My average click cost was .34 cents and I doubled my money. A little optimization of ads and keywords would have made this campaign make some good money I think. It wasn't a slap just for one landing page or one ad or a few keywords. My whole domain is tainted I guess. I couldn't find anything really wrong with the site. I'm Not trying to plug my site but if any of you can tell me what not to do next time I would appreciate it. www.zoeyzoo.com. Thanks for any feed back.
Your site takes forever to load
I don't know why your asp pages take so long to load.
So I go to the product reviews page and there are no reviews, Where are they?
And then as I read further, Oooohhh , you want me to write a review, and it will only take a few minutes, Sorry I don't have time.
And then I go to the who is zooeyzoo page and a see a glob of text that is not paragraphed and broken up for easy scanning, Oh forget that.
I'm not saying you can't sell product on this site, but I'm sure your bounce rate must be high.
Regards
Dupatta
Thanks For The Feed Back
Thanks For The Feed Back. Working On Website Now To Resolve Issues. This Is Exactly What I Was Looking For Honest Feed Back. Your Feedback Is Greatly Appreciated.
Wish You All The Best Success.
Not an easy lesson to learn,
Not an easy lesson to learn, as I violate it myself all the time ...t's hard to wait and go through the steps you really need to go throgh before you start buying traffic ... but there is no doubt that Google is a hard taskmaster when it come to new guys ... or old guys trying to cut corners. No gigantic catastrophe here though, just pause your campaigns and 'tune things up' and you'll get back on track.
One thing you might consider ... and this is only a thought of mine, mind you, not trying to bust on you personally in any way .. but would you be inclined to buy anything (click through and buy anything) from a person called zoeyzoo?
Ever notice how many of the 'big names' who are making the substantial money use their real names (or one that sounds real ... how do I know if Jeremy Palmer's real name is Jeremey Palmer in other words?
Point is, I'm not with the FBI or with a credit agency, I don't require a guys fingerprints to exstend a certain amount of trust. He sounds real and presents himself as real so I tend to trust him ... might not work in your particular niche,I understand, but it's something worth thinking about
I agree with Dave. When I
I agree with Dave. When I clicked on the "About" link I expected to see a picture of a guy holding a dog - not just a few lines of text.
If you want to establish your own brand, make your site more personal. Maybe even consider putting a picture of yourself (holding a pet) on the home page.
To counter the image problem that might come from the name "zooeyzoo", stress that your site promotes only high-quality, familiar brands.
I'd also consider improving the design of the site. I can sympathize with the amount of time it took you to build it - but it looks a little amateurish. Post a design contest on 99designs.com and I'll bet you'll get some great submissions.
Moe
Check your site in multiple
Check your site in multiple browsers, It barely appears to be the same site in IE and Firefox (at http://zoeyzoo.com/default.aspx at least).
I didn't bother checking your code but there's an obvious problem with it.
While Google isn't known as "html cops" per say, they still may not be seeing what you think you are showing at all...it may not even be close.
They're also known to dislike JavaScript (not that I checked to see if you're using it or not).
Page Rank
Hi there Zoey Zoo,
Just done a simple analysis of your page on Yahoo Backlink Checker and saw that you have no real backlinks to your site indexed in Yahoo so am assuming this is the same in Google. You should think about writing a few articles and blogs to link to your site as a major factor that google will look for is how many "authority sites" your site is linked to.
Olly
Some questions
Before anything, I need to make it clear that the price and avg position is determined by the quality score, ad copy+landing page relevancy, and your keywords
Now I'm not too sure what your keywords or what you set for landing pages, but you need to consider a few things while creating your adwords campaign
Account history
-How old is your account? The quality score is based in part on your account history, and if your account is new, google uses the average performance for the same keywords to start. That usually why the first few days of a new account is usually very good because its based only on an average performance of that keyword across all accounts bidding on that keyword. but once your account starts getting a bit more history, the algorithm gives more weight to your account history, that means depending on how it performs on the first few days (based on the existing averages) it makes the quality score very volatile to any changes or poor performance.
ad copy relevancy to your landing page
-i.e. if you're bidding on the keywords "dog food" and direct it to the "bird seeds" page where it never mentions anything about dog food, your quality score is going to be horrible and google will determine that the ad you're serving and its landing page is not relevant or useful to the searcher, therefore you get slapped. When writing your ad text you should always try to include in some key phrases or words into the landing page. Obviously, if you had an ad with the title "buy tasty dog food" that lands on a page titled "Tasty dog food" with content on that page that talks about buying tasty dog food, your quality score will be in the green.
There's a lot more that goes into getting googleslapped, but this is a good starting point.
In summary, to avoid being slapped, you should always consider the connection between the ad copy, landing page, keywords, and the overall quality score. The easier it is for google to connect your ad to your content, the more improved your bottom line will be: higher CTR, cheaper CPC, more conversions ($) for you.