Guidelines to Avoid the Google Adwords Slap

The following blog post is a guest post by Clickbank Account Specialist, Jeni Rogers.

As you already may be aware, Google has recently stepped up their quality enforcement activities. ClickBank is working closely with Google to learn more about quality guidelines so we can provide information on best practices to our clients on how to avoid a Google Slap. The term "Google Slap" is typically used to describe a situation when an AdWords ad’s Quality Score has been lowered, affecting traffic flow to that site. In rare situations, it can even result in an account being banned from advertising on Google. The purpose of the Quality Score reflects Google’s mission to deliver high quality and relevant information to online searchers and applies to ads as well as natural search results. Google would rather show no ads than what it deems to be poor quality ads. Google uses the following factors when calculating a Quality Score:

1. Clickthrough Rate (CTR): Google looks at the historical ad performance and considers this to be one of the most important variables in the Quality Score.
2. Real-Time Relevancy: Google looks at the relevancy of the site to the search conducted.
   
3. Landing Page: Google looks at the landing page to ensure that the results are unique and relevant to the search conducted. A low landing page score can be due to factors such as:

• Irrelevant results or arbitrage sites that are designed just to show ads
• Attempts that trick or try to gather leads or serve ads while providing no information or value
• Annoying page elements such as popovers/unders, exit scripts, long videos that cannot be paused or stopped
• Sites that distribute malware (knowingly or unknowingly)
• Sites that advertise excessive or unverifiable claims such as "guaranteed"
  
• Affiliate sites that don’t comply with Google’s affiliate guidelines
  

ClickBank advises that you use this information as a guideline to check your page for elements that may violate their rules, change them and resubmit to Google if you are affected by the Google Slap. In certain instances, ClickBank may be able to assist in the discussion with Google. Please contact me for more information.

ClickBank recently conducted a webinar series on "Avoiding the Google Slap" which was hosted by Dush Ramachandran, VP Sales of Business Development. For additional details, please view the video available.

You might also like to review the post we did a while back on How to Avoid a Google Slap.

Note: The views and opinions of the author of this guest post may not represent the views and opinions of Affilorama.