I mean, there must be a business reason why they are eliminating probably hundreds of millions of annual dollars out of their revenue stream by eliminating affiliates. Do you think they are trying to put the affiliate networks out of business? Maybe they are going to have their own network be the only one allowed into Adwords in the future.
After reading hundreds of accounts of affiliates being banned and that we all received the same form letters its clear that we are collateral damage for some greater plan. What do you think they are up to?
> How does something like Clickbank stay in operation? It's 100% affiliates
> redirecting business to a different sales page. Are most of them starting
> to get banned?
I believe that they are or soon will be. At least those whose landing page is "designed to drive traffic to another site with a different domain", which seems to be most of them.
> Does this include all the thousands of mirrored sites that are hosted under a
> legitimate domain and appear to be the legitimate site? They're not
> redirecting traffic to another site, just redirecting the final product
> orders through the main site.
This I'm not clear about. To me, that would be a good way to go. However, I'm not sure how Google would be able to determine if the link is to an affiliate's sale page or their order page. So technically, you could get banned but I think you'd have a good case not to be. Let's hear from anyone who may have been banned (or not) having such a structure.
> p.s. What happens if you're totally new to adwords and everything you try
> gets a terrible QS until you figure out what you're doing. Are you likely to
> be banned before you even get the hang of it?
My suggestion is to learn how to use the system, read the TOS. Unfortunately, it seems most don't do that. I think most of the banned people simply did not read or ignored the TOS and they could all have saved themselves the trouble.
> Also, what causes an ads QS to drop steadily over several days?
This will happen mostly on new keywords or ads. As the system gathers more data from your campaign, the QS gets adjusted accordingly. A more mature campaign (ie: has enough impressions, the threshold may be 1000) will not have drastic ups and downs in short period of time. It might if you have a new ad that is very poor (or very good) but this ad would have to be so much poorer or better than your control to have an effect on QS. Most people's ad quality is more gradual. The other side of the coin is your competitors having better quality ads which is dragging you down.
I completely agree with your theory jkwilson and think that may be why a lot of non-affiliate sites got the ban. Which of course sucks for affiliates who got banned still, but you said exactly what I've been thinking as far as regular publishers getting the slap.
The thing is it's almost too simple and ridiculous a theory :-) Google could easily compile a list of affiliate network domains and look for links and redirects that contain them.
Now if you take my other theory that human reviewers play a larger role than most people think then they could easily go crazy flagging anything that is a "3rd party" link (anything that has a different domain than the landing page)
Enough false positives by human reviewers that are used to fine tune the algos could easily introduce weird anomalies like this.
Are there any types of websites that merit low landing page quality scores?
Website Types to Avoid
* Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to collect private information
If that is likely a more legitimate way to go to avoid banning, thats what I want to do, rather than continue to use a landing page (I don't know how my adwords initially got approved, but I suspended them all after 2 days one I started reading about the bans)
As far as actually learning how to set up a mirrored version of a site that contains an affiliate referral ID? Do you know what thread might be good for that question? (I can set up a mirrored site easily enough, but I don't know how people are preserving the affiliate ID without having someone click on the http: //www.hkjh3245hkj234.RandomAffiliateService.com that was provided by the affiliate service)
Website Types to Avoid
* Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to collect private information
But what is considered data collection? Is simply having an opt-in form of any kind anywhere on a site considered data collection?
Technically it could be.
But the real aim is more likely to get rid of the scammy free ipod, PS3 or ringtone sites.
But because that guideline is so incredibly subjective (and Google conveniently ads that ambiguous "etc" in there it's easy to see how legitimate sites can and have been unfairly suspended.
This is paid advertising, not SEO. So it makes a whole lot more sense to be more open and more specific about their guidelines. If their guidelines are very specific and point out more or less specifically what they find acceptable and unacceptable how could the system be gamed?
Wouldn't it be far easier to say "Hey, we don't want a landing page that forces someone to opt in or leave with no way to do anything else on the site."
They won't do this because big brands that may use these kinds of methods would be in obvious violation of the guidelines.
So by making things ambiguous and unclear they can easily let big advertisers slide by on some things.
Conspiracy theory? Sure
But you don't have to look far to see huge advertisers providing junk ads to irrelevant landing pages that will never get suspended by Google.
But you don't have to look far to see huge advertisers providing junk ads to irrelevant landing pages that will never get suspended by Google.
That's an interesting point.
If true, could it be because "huge advertisers" are actually valid well known companies that will never hurt Google's users in a way so Google has to take the responsibility?
you can search: -marketing wall of shame- for more details.
I do not have any unnecessary content like the history of hiking boots, or famous hiking trails, or food that might be consumed during hiking, I just have the boots and information about the boots that the customer is looking for.
So how is that business model flawed? How is this a bad experience for the customer? The customer is looking for hiking boots. How can these pages get QS in the range of 1, 2 3, and 4 out of 10? How can my account be banned for such a business?
Yet Google has deemed this site and associated landing pages ‘Bridge Pages’ with the sole purpose of driving traffic to another site. So what is the problem? Customer looks for information on hiking boots, and I provide that. I potentially get a commission, the customer get the boots they want, and Google gets revenue from the ad that is run while the customer using Google finds my site.
Can someone please explain to me why this doesn’t work?
exact same boots
and exact same mortgages
Instead they try to blend them together and make the user think an ad is an actual search result. Since that doesn't quite work and makes google look shady, they have advanced it to the ridiculous point of forcing advertisers to meet some sort of arbitrary guideline for content.
Google is turning advertising on its head in a very bad way. This strict content rules with super keyword relevance is not a good thing for advertising, and will not end up being the rule of the future.
Like I said, if Google had a valid concern, they would provide big advertising disclaimers on their ads so searchers knew what were ads and what were not. Media ethics for years have made it so advertising mediums of any credibility would clearly delineate sponsors from editorial content. It this case the serps are their content.
Quality would be splitting the two clearly and decisively and then taking a wider audience competing to advertise. If someone search for a cadillac they might be interested in information about golf.
It's not that they all were mortgage brokers. It's the fact they were all the SAME mortgage broker.
Netmeg is right. It's a variation of the one-ad, one-URL argument. People have been complaining of clicking on some ads which all eventually took them to the same affiliate by clicking links on those pages.It's not that they all were mortgage brokers. It's the fact they were all the SAME mortgage broker.
Agreed! And well put.
This is actually an official Google Adwords policy (although you really have to dig for it):
Why won't you show multiple ads leading to identical or similar landing pages?To ensure the best possible user experience, AdWords won't show multiple ads leading to identical or similar landing pages at the same time. This is true even if the pages have different domains.
In the case that multiple ads with similar or identical landing pages are eligible to show for a certain search query, AdWords will show the ad with the highest Ad Rank.
This policy is particularly applicable to affiliate and reseller advertisers, but may apply to any advertiser regardless of business relationship.
If you find that your ad often isn't showing due to this policy, try improving your Ad Rank by increasing your keywords' Quality Scores and/or maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids. Or, try refining your site so that one of the following is true:
* Your site contains additional products which are not found on your parent company's or other advertisers' sites
* Your site serves a different purpose than your parent company's or other affiliates' or resellers' sites
* The prices on your site are significantly different than other advertisers' prices
If you make changes to your site and would like to be re-reviewed, please contact us. The AdWords support team will then work with you on next steps.
Affiliates: you may wish to contact your affiliate parent company directly to ensure any changes to your page align with your affiliate agreement.
[adwords.google.com...]
