Adwords Slap, help

I seem to have gotten a google slap in Adwords, but not in organic search.

[SeoPpcJensen]

I logged into my AdWords account and see that I seem to have gotten a Google slap. However I'm kind of confused as to why. I have an estimated first page bid of $10 per click (old interface states my ads aren't running due to low quality score). Since April 21 I have not gotten one click to my site (although I have other campaigns going to other sites that don't seem to be impacted). I looked and don't see any impact to my organic Google traffic. I'm not doing anything black hat or arbitrage so I'm not quite sure what to do (although my site is a thin affiliate site).

What should I do beyond politely asking Google for an explanation?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

[CathyM]

I can only offer sympathy not a solution. My affiliate site was slapped sometime early this morning. It went from great to poor quality scores. My organic rankings are unaffected.

[SeoPpcJensen]

I did talk with an adwords rep who pointed out my site was linking quite excessively (thin affiliate) to eBay. I'm thinking I'll just rebuild a new site with similar content (it's not black hat, I promise). Can I ask if you were a thin affiliate and how extensive your linking to your promotee was?

[CathyM]

Yes, it might be considered thin affiliate. I had extensive linking to multiple merchants on my landing pages. I believe that I had Great scores because I did have good CTR and my landing pages are highly targeted to the ads and products. Once slapped, it seems the whole domain is penalized.

[SeoPpcJensen]

Yes, my whole domain seems to be impacted too. (Although all my pages would have looked very similar.) I'm curious if we got slapped by an automated or human action.

[edited by: SeoPpcJensen at 6:24 pm (utc) on May 4, 2009]

[Seb7]

I got slapped a few weeks ago. I'm not sure if it was because my account CTR dropped below a certain level, or it may have been to do with affiates, as it was slapped the same day I started to get hits from the first affilate.

[Israel]

I'm curious if we got slapped by an automated or human action.

Automated, IMO.

I had a domain and Google claimed most of my keywords were "Great" for the longest time. Between May 3rd and May 4th, all the mininum bids jumped to $10.00 -- makes no sense at all to me.

Oddly, the same thing happened on April 21st to another domain. Suggests to me it is automated. I don't get the impression that Google has too many people working there anymore on anything to do with that Adwords thing that brings in most of their income.

Can anyone verify that it is indeed the landing page that Google "slaps" -- as opposed to the home page of the domain? I did swap out the home page of the most recently hit domain this weekend -- and now I'm starting to kick myself. All my Adword ads sent people to targeted pages inside the domain, never to the home page. Just seems rather odd that overnight, Google would suddenly consider every single page on the site equally stinky.

Israel

[SeoPpcJensen]

They flag the domain, not the page as "web spam".