The issue I would like for you to address is of course is the radical rise in the minim bid costs that many of us are seeing. To get at this problem, I spoke to one rep on the phone today as my personal rep is “unavailable” and has been all day. I sent a lengthy email to support early this morning (my rep) and left a voice mail for my rep to contact me immediately. So far the only response I have gotten was from the lower the level rep when I declined to leave another voice mail for my personal rep. She was very apologetic and nice, but didn’t know what was going on. She told me all the reps were told was to expect some changes, but that they were not told what the changes would encompass or whom the changes would affect. She said she had spoken to some customers today that had similar issues, but simply put she doesn’t know what to advise them as she doesn’t know what the new quality system looks for other than the generic stuff from the Google Ad Words page. She looked at my account, and I had her note the same ad had been running in excess of 2 years and had produced a click through rate of 26% in those 2 years, and she agreed it wasn’t really possible to increase the quality the ad itself. She had no idea how often the bot looks at the pages so you can see if changes you make actually improve your quality score.
Your employees have been uninformed and left in the dark about these major changes to your program, and perhaps more importantly your paying customers have been left in the dark as well. The smart thing would have been to come to the community months ago and said hey we are thinking about some major changes, these are how these changes are going to affect you, and here is what you can do to bring your landing pages up to snuff. That way your business partners would not be left holding the bag when they are hit with overnight radical price increases, and are forced to seek immediate answers from your employees who have also been left in the dark, and have no useful information to provide your customers. I would suggest as good business etiquette and professionalism would dictate you roll these changes back immediately and evaluate what you have learned from this. Then come forward and announce what changes you plan to make, describe in detail what accounts it will have a negative impact on, and provide in detail guidelines for producing the type of landing pages that you want. That way your business partners can make a business decision as to if they want to continue to do business with you under the new system.
Sincerely
Mark A. Libbert
Attorney At Law
P.S. If any Overture/Yahoo rep is lurking I have 10-12k a month buy for you.
Finally, as of the day before these changes, many of these ads were running at low bid prices. Rome was not built in a day, so it is completely unnecessary to say "Today all these ads must be 100% removed from the network." By upping the bid price the get rid of the bulk of them, while giving them time to tweak things to get rid of the rest over time. They also give advertisers the chance to "un-ban" themselves and get lower click costs.
Another reason. If someone is "banned", they ain't coming back as ad buyers. Generally, the way they have done it, when and if min. bids are adjusted, and it becomes profitable for ad buyers (who claim they'll never come back) to advertize, a certain percentage (perhaps a much larger % than most google haters would realize) WILL come back.
Business is business. Money talks for advertizers. Many will reactivate in a second the DAY it becomes profitable to do so. After reading so many posts in this thread, it's clear that some people are so money driven they WILL come back, despite what they say publicly.
particularly after they dip a toe in the MSN adcenter "beta" (actually more like an alpha), and realize that overture/yahoo's bids are going to be a whole lot higher than google's were, and that Yahoo isn't quite ready for prime time either.
It's a smart business strategy for google to leave the door open if people want to walk back in.
aeiouy I understand what you are getting at with the soft ban idea, I believe EFV expressed a similar sentiment earlier. I feel however that in terms of PR it was a bad move. Affected advertisers tend to be viewing the high prices to reactivate as both cynical and hypocritical. Whether a positive reaction (i.e. cpc decrease) to landing page changes will soften this stance time will tell. As rbacal points out, it probably will.
I don't disagree that it could have been handled better. That being said, I have sneaking suspicion that a bunch of the people who wanted an advanced warning would not have taken action until they were forced to do so by the changes or would have been just as equally vocal in their distaste for having to create a quality landing page.
Scarcity and demand dictate value! With demand for adwords exposure unlikely to decrease and placement harder to achieve I think things are about to really heat up. Unfortunately the lack of cheap clicks will probably mean an increase in incidence of black hat tactics and fraud (click & otherwise).
I agree, I still see MFA sites in the top of results, and bad ones at that. My site is far better quality, but since its an affiliate site, google hates it.
How about we assume that for NOW, google has missed a lot of junk sites, because the process is new. Let's just assume that.
Now, let's also forget about whether your site is better than really bad sites.
Because it's coming down to this. What are you offering visitors that distinguishes you from any and all other affiliates or site owners?
Just forget how badly google has screwed up by leaving the really bad sites in there (hey, it drives me nuts, too).
If I went to your site, would I go: "Hey, cool. I can't get this content anywhere else?" Does it tell me something I didn't know? Does it allow me to do something I can't do on other similar sites?
Look, I don't care, personally, but google does. And it does indeed take a lot of time and expertise to create a really good affiliate site that is more than just the same old crap.
BTW, I have a campaign that looks EXACTLY like an affiliate campaign to the bot (it's actually for our own products, but it uses the same landing pages that affiliates would use). Near as I can tell the adwords bot can't even spider the pages (they are third party payment processor pages).
Guess what. We weren't hit (yet).
Not all affiliate pages were hit.
I could answer yes to all of the questions you listed if you were looking for the information I provide...And I was still hit..Not sure what it was but fortunately I can live with it...
Again, no one knows for whom the quality bot tolls...
Goodnight.
you might want to dampen that more quality than thou routine. I don't see your website listed anywhere
My websites aren't really relevant to the discussion since I was NOT hit. So, they're not useful in determining the quality of sites that WERE hit.
PS. One of the issues/problems I've faced over the years developing websites is I have a LOT of trouble (boredom, mostly) if I try to create sites that are basically useless to anyone. I experimented a bit trying to create a few sites outside of my areas of expertise to see if that would be something worth doing. It wasn't. I couldn't stand the work, so basically scrapped those projects. I can't STAND wasting my time to create sites just to make money.
Well...
I make my living from websites, so I HAVE to make money.
It's not a hobby or a pastime for me!
But regardless, I understand where you are coming from somehow, being passionate about what you do never hurts.
But making money never hurts either. And this is what this thread is all about! $$$
Cheers!
If I went to your site, would I go: "Hey, cool. I can't get this content anywhere else?" Does it tell me something I didn't know? Does it allow me to do something I can't do on other similar sites?
With over a billion pages on the internet, I can guarantee that there's not a person on here that has unique information on their pages. And I don't think that is what google is looking for anyway.
The algo seems to be very complex, and uses many variables for it's equation. It seems that most of the variables come from your URLs history of performance, and not actually from your page itself. Which is why you can lower your cpc by putting the same exact material onto a new URL.
A lot of it has to do with how users behave on your website. And on many websites, google has no way of knowing how they behave, except for those users that immediately hit the back button. Therefore, there is a lot of it that has nothing to do with the quality of the actual website, but with how fast your website loads up when your ad is clicked.
Also according to my rep, google is in the business of guessing how a user will behave on your website with other algos. By using things such as - how many links does it take from entry to conversion, etc.
So they are not actually tracking users (because they can't) but they are just guessing how they "might" behave on your site. This is where I believe their algos break down. You can not guess how a user will behave on a site. Any one who tracks user's behavior day after day on a site knows exactly what I'm talking about. When you can tweak one word on your site and have your conversion rate shoot up or down by 50%, there's no way you can make an algo that's going to guess a user's behavior. You may be able to come close by using user's history, but I've been tracking click behavior long enough to know that click history can not always be used to determine future behaviors.
I can guarantee that there's not a person on here that has unique information on their pages.
Ok. Your interpretation of what I said is not correct. The point is what unique value your site provides, if any. For example, if I want to see your opinion on something, and it is on your site, that page is UNIQUE, I can't get your opinion elsewhere, and it adds value, in the strange occurence that I might actually value your opinion and/or that you have some expertise I am interested in. However, if you have no expertise on your subject, have really nothing to say at all, then...ehhh...and you might have gotten hit by google for that.
It's a lot like getting a book published. :You guys might benefit from motoring over to a publishers site (Mcgraw-Hill is good), and taking a read of the guidelines for writing proposals, since although it's a completely different thing, they are a really good discipline for creating a site or fixing a site.
With over a billion pages on the internet, I can guarantee that there's not a person on here that has unique information on their pages.
Actually, he said "unique content." That isn't the same as "unique information."
And let's not quibble about what "unique content" is when we all know what it isn't: boilerplate copy supplied by a manufacturer, an affiliate program, or another vendor.
[Edited to acknowledge that rbacal beat me to the punch!]
With over a billion pages on the internet, I can guarantee that there's not a person on here that has unique information on their pages.
I disagree. I have many pages displaying my own designed widgets. I don't think they can be found anywhere else on the web...
I disagree. I have many pages displaying my own designed widgets. I don't think they can be found anywhere else on the web.
Same here. Our products are created by us. Our copy is created by us. Our books are created by us.
I suspect some people really have no concept of actually creating something (however similar or different from other such things), so they tend to denigrate it or believe there's no such thing.
Those that can't create, affiliate!
Those that can't create, affiliate!
I create and affiliate. There's nothing wrong with either one. Without affiliates, many websites wouldn't be where they are today, including google.
And as a creator - I know that any thing that I create for the web that is of value, is eventually copied. If you don't think that your stuff is copied elsewhere on the internet, then you just haven't found it, or it just isn't of value.
But my point was - that original content is not what google is looking for.
But my point was - that original content is not what google is looking for
I'd love to see your sites that have been hit. You may not be the best judge of what you have.
I'd love to see your sites that have been hit. You may not be the best judge of what you have.
I'd be careful. Showing arrogance exposes a lack of intelligence.
I have many many sites. Some were hit, but many were not. I'm not the average Joe that is angry because my site was hit, and I can no longer do business. I'm a concerned google adwords user that has enough websites to see that the algo being used is not working the way that it is being claimed to work.
I have some copyrighted original work that was hit, I have some affiliate sites, that are the same as a thousand other affiliate sites that were not hit. And viceversa.
I'm not here to argue whether my site is better than yours or yours better than mine. I'm just here to say that there is no way you can create an algo that will accurately measure quality - especially with the many number of unique niche areas out there. Which is why I don't think they are actually measuring quality, but performance. And performance can not be accurately measured, unless you have full access to web logs etc. And google does not.
And performance can not be accurately measured, unless you have full access to web logs etc.
But performance and opportunity cost of your clicks from the standpoint of Google's profit can be measured perfectly, without even touching your site or its logs. I suspect many of the anomalies we see with how the 'quality score' treats one site vs. another have to do with profit optimization.
I believe that to be exactly right, and that has nothing to do with actual quality. And it's why we still see MFA sites in the mix.
Let's say I own bluewidgetcompare.com (let's just assume this site is a world leader in terms of unique content:) and I display affiliate links to bluewidget.com & thebluewidget.com etc. (bear with me, remember, loads of unique content, real hard hitting stuff, relevence up the gazoo). Both of these sites and I bid on many of the same kwords. I used to link direct to bluewidget.com before the single domain policy change forced me to either outbid my merchant or build bluewidgetcompare.com, I chose the latter.
Getting to my point, is it possible that G, on finding that my page links to domains that are already displayed in the Adwords results, views it as a contravention of the single domain policy and reduces the Q.S?
"Our Landing Page Quality Specialists had a look at your website and found that the major focus of your site is to display AdWords ads alongside the content on your page. Per our new Landing Page Quality criteria these websites have a low Quality Score. "
hmm.... I guess I cant "display Adwords ads alongside the content." go figure. is there any other way I can display Adsense?
please tell me Im missing something here.
[edited by: eWhisper at 12:35 pm (utc) on July 28, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] Please don't out sites. [/edit] [/edit][/1]
Do you...
- optimize your bid position based on ROI, which tends to put you in position 3+ and rarely (if ever) in position 1?
- suspect there's a huge gap (300%+) between your average bid and that of the bidder in position 1?
- tend to use low CPC keywords to approach generally high CPC markets?
My personal experience, and that of a few others to whom I have spoken, indicates that the above factors *might* make you vulnerable to low 'quality'. I imagine site quality is a factor, but I don't think it tells the whole story.
cheers, dub
[edited by: eWhisper at 12:36 pm (utc) on July 28, 2006]
Just a guess, of course.
I think you hit that nail right on the head there. quality means nothing to Google, only money does. there is a reason I see people giving them their new logo: G$$gle.
if you do a search on my keywords, you will find sites that have NOTHING BUT ADS on them, yet after I pointed out this to G, they remain there. believe me, these AD ONLY sites are not paying $10 / click for these keywords....
so, assuming that what you said is true, people better watch out when making sites that would normally score high in the adwords quality score - you just may get penalized for being too good.... quality score too high, your clicks are too cheap to give away.... oportunity cost becomes an issue. money talks, quality walks.
go figure.
lastly, thank you pdivi for your time and help.
-dub-
YOur site is excellent, I don't think it should be free actually. You should charge for such a good service.
How about approaching the credit card companies and banks directly in an effort to completely bypass Google?
If I owned a bank, I'd advertise on your site!
Something else that might be hurting you is the nature of your site, loans and mortgages, just like Casinos and gambling it raises a red flag...I wouldn't be surprised if Google is penalizing you for that!
Just my opinion of course, no proof at all.
i had worse sites stick around for sure.
