November 14th, 2006 by James Omdahl
I am still looking around for opinions on the new changes to Quality Score on AdWords (thanks to those who have left comments on yesterday’s post). I actually ran into a different theory that is a whole lot less scary than the “Google-targeting-affiliates” theory.
You can check the thread over at the Search Engine Watch forums, but to summarize, it basically says that Google is not really targeting affiliates as much as it is targeting AdSense arbitrage sites (websites that bit on keywords on Google, then display Google AdSense ads on their site in hopes that they can make more from their AdSense clicks than they can spend on their AdWords ads).
It would be hard to argue that AdSense arbitrage sites are “high quality results” (but if anyone wants to try, please leave a comment), so I am all for Google cleaning up the arbitrage problem. Of course, if all Google was targeting were sites that display AdSense (and Y!PN ads), they should be able to pretty easily spot the code with the AdWords bot and target only arbitrage affiliates.
But it seems like Google is going further and looking for pages that just have low quality content…which might be why non-AdSense affiliates are feeling some pain at this point. If that is the case, it makes me think the changes at Google might be aimed at more than just AdSense sites…but I’m not really sure.
So what do you think? Leave a comment and weigh in.
Related posts:
- Opt-Out Coming for AdSense for Domains? Barry Schwartz reported some promising news he found via WebmasterWorld...
- Google’s Quality Score Changes - Are You Scared? if you are going to ever leave a comment this...
- Will Google Cost-Per-Action Ads Destroy the Affiliate Networks? ...
- Google Demographic Targeting for AdWords It appears that Google is attacking one of the key...
- Minor AdWords Quality Score Updates Brings a Major Smackdown on Some [Is it me or is this week the week of...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
November 14th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
What I am saying is…give peace a chance…whoops - that was another decade.
What I am saying is…I dont think I have low quality content on my site. Maybe 300 pages cannot compete with the thousands of pages larger sites can deliver. I have off-line and online clients that use my pages all the time. People find my pages useful, but adwords does not.
…. However that aside, the thing is - it is a balance. We all know that highly targeted, call to action type pages convert. If we bury the adv in a really interesting article, conversion will drop. If the search engine wants to give me free traffic, that is acceptable, but if Im PAYING for traffic, it is not acceptable. In my experience it has just been such a tough frustrating experience that I feel better served trying to produce more content pages and getting organic traffic.
HOWEVER, as James points out, this puts me in the league of affiliates (with this and another unrelated programs)who can certainly justify the effort, but not think about qualifying for the ski trip.
November 14th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
Mar.. I agree about the paid advertising vs. organic search results. If youre a business paying for placement, then you should be allowed to advertise as long as you dont have any objectionable content (gambling, pharma, etc.). Google makes their money by blurring the lines between paid and search so theyre forced to pick and choose their advertisers. If they just placed a larger and darker font explaining that the results are advertisements and not Googles results, then the user will not care as much about their experience because they know that theyre ads. What about companies that are interested just in branding? They will just want to blast their message out to as many keywords as possible whether or not theyre relevant. I see this all the time with eBay and others and Google allows it. Why are they allowed to get around the quality rules and we are not??
November 14th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Chuck, your post made me grin. I remember a website that suggested doing searches for things like farts and seeing “Get farts on Ebay” in the google sponsored lists. I tried it tonight, and I guess they cleaned it up. (ha ha - inusuremeblog will rank high for farts in 6 weeks).
When I look at a lot of the top pages (sorry about clicking ads and all), they are nothing but one page advertisements. I guess quality has something to do with what we think of as quality, and something to do with the size of an adv. budget.
Maybe thats just good business, but given my own situation, I dont understand how it makes business sense for me to waste a lot more time trying to figure out how to win a game that doesnt seem to have clearly defined rules.
November 15th, 2006 at 2:24 am
My own search engine experience is rather poor, I wouldnt give any search engine more than a 5 on a scale of 10. I get a lot of fake “search results” pages containing nothing but paid-for links of various kinds. Often when I click on an advertisement it also leads to a nonsense page.
I think Google lost the PageRank war - the ranking of search results became too easy to manipulate. Now they have started an originality war. Google wont take users to a site unless it has content that the user wont find in a better form anywhere else.
Affiliate that run their own serious content sites will hopefully be unaffected. But sites like my own, that mainly link to various other sites, too easily get in the way of the end user.
Google is working hard to promote “real” Internet sites. I think thats a very honorable cause in the long run. Unfortunately, all my own sites are completely worthless, really. Time for a new business plan?
November 15th, 2006 at 2:32 am
Im on the InsureMe.com in-house affiliate program, so all my Google ads point to the InsureMe.com website. They have now all been made inactive because of a low quality index.
Has this affected all members of the in-house program (since we use the same landing pages), or does the quality score also relate to the search term and advertisment?
November 15th, 2006 at 6:46 am
I use the in-house program too. I am really happy about that because I think their in-house program works better than CJ anyway.
However, I always pointed to a landing page - not the affiliate code - but it was like an FPA (full page adv) with links to the other content of my site. Google Dissed that too. Too bad, it converts about 50% off of their traffic. With that conversion I have a lot of wiggle room for bids, but even that gets rediculous at some point.
If I change the landing page to be my main page, or an article page, the conversion will drop so much I could not profit with the bids Im having to make. I guess the idea is that I should not have to bid as much. I dunno…. At this point I think the only way to test that would probably be with a new campaign and new domain…and maybe its worth a shot. WHo knows?
November 15th, 2006 at 9:06 am
Mar, Chuck and Magnus - thanks for the well though out comments. I think you all are making some great points here.
I agree that if you are paying for an advertisement you should have the right to make your landing page say whatever you want…content or ad text. I mean that is why you are paying, right?
And I also have seen proof that larger advertisers tend to get more leeway when it comes to quality. I guess the real question is if “quality” really means good content or if it means having a start to finish user experience happening on the site. I know there arguments on either side of that, but I don’t really like the thought of Google deciding what qualifies as a “real” website.
I love Chucks point about Google solving some of these issues by being clearer about what is a paid advertisement and what is not. I would be totally interested to see some research on how a move towards clarity in this area would affect Google’s bottom line.
I also like Magnus’ idea about the “originality” war. I never really though about it that way, but if there is some plan to start pushing affiliates out of the Google results, it does show weakness in the “PageRank” method of ranking sites. Trying to correct this weakness in PageRank driven results with adding in an “originality” filter is an interesting concept, but it seems like there could be a lot of collateral damage in the implementation…of course, Google has never minded a few innocent casualties in its quest to be the best.
Regarding pointing links directly to InsureMe.com from AdWords - I find it interesting that they cracked down on you there. To me, it sounds like Google is manually looking for affiliates who send traffic directly to vendors and taking them out. I say this mainly because we have not been directly affected by these changes, and I am not really sure how Google would know for sure that we are the actual site owner and you are not without some kind of human intervention (or some close examinations of WhoIs records).
This is interesting though - since Google told advertisers that they were handling ad serving from multiple accounts to one URL algorithmically in the past (best CTR+CPC wins no matter whose account it comes from). Has anyone else who sends direct traffic to an affiliate partner gotten their AdWords account shut down?
Keep the comments coming folks - if we are lucky one of those elusive Google reps will pop in and give us some insight.
Oh yeah, and thanks for the help in ranking for “farts” Mar…for some reason we already get a lot of traffic from “face slapping,” so farts should help boost our visitor numbers too