Struggling with Adwords or Yahoo Advertising? Find and discuss ways to improve your CPC, ROI or conversion rate. Get advice and share ideas on ad copy.

Quality Score Issues for Money Keywords
kenc138
Posts: 30
Joined: 14 Nov 09
Trust:
11 Apr 10 5:28 pm

Quality Score Issues for Money Keywords

Hi, I have a question. I am familiar with PPC and QS, but I'm currently hitting the following issue:

I wrote my "Panic Away Review" following the guidelines in Mark's landing page tutorial. I have "Panic Away Review" in my H1 tag and the page is perfectly optimized for search engines (alt tags, meta tags, etc).

My QS is 4/10 for this keyword, but 6-7/10 for everything else! Google states there are no problems with my Keyword Relevance, Load time or Landing Page quality. The site is about 30 pages in depth and is very transparent and white hat in nature.

Is it likely that my CTR is contributing to this terrible QS? Past affiliates using this word incorrectly?

Thanks so much :)

___________________________________________________________
Update 1:

Today Google knocked 10 of my keywords to a QS of 1/10 and sited there were no problems with landing page, load time or keyword relevance.

My website is 30 pages deep in unique, SEO optimized content. All I can say is: what the hell? The site is as legit and white hat as it gets.

Any idea why in the world Google would do this?
___________________________________________________________
Update 2:

Now, all of my keywords have been slapped to 1/10 for the panic/anxiety niche with Google citing "no problems" for all the important aspects of keywords (load time, relevance and landing page quality).

Anyone have any ideas?
___________________________________________________________
Update 3:

Prior to my new domain getting slapped, I was receiving 30-100 unique organic hits, since the slap I've received none. Does this mean I am no longer able to rank organically for my keywords?
  • 1
Last edited by kenc138 on 16 Apr 10 8:02 pm, edited 2 times in total.
 

Moderator
slvrsrfr
Posts: 389
Joined: 25 Feb 09
Trust:
17 Apr 10 1:23 am

 Hey Ken,

There could be a ton of reasons this has happened. Sometimes Google just slaps affiliates of certain products. That could be happening. It could also be your CTR wasn't particularly good.

Did you try and have tight AdWords campaigns? In other words just a few really targeted closely related keywords per campaign. That can help.

Also have a look at any other products you're promoting. How are they doing and try to figure out why they might be doing better if that is the case.

Hope this helps,

Jason
  • 1
kenc138
Posts: 30
Joined: 14 Nov 09
Trust:
17 Apr 10 2:11 am

 Hi Jason, thanks for the response.

There could be a ton of reasons this has happened. Sometimes Google just slaps affiliates of certain products. That could be happening. It could also be your CTR wasn't particularly good.


My CTR wasn't the best, but then again the campaign wasn't live long enough to even get many impressions. I think I was under 100 impressions for every keyword. I think at one point I even raised my bids to like $2 per so I could boost the CTR faster, but the slap happened pretty fast.

Did you try and have tight AdWords campaigns? In other words just a few really targeted closely related keywords per campaign. That can help.


I suppose my ad groups could have been a little tighter, although the worst QS I had before the slap was 6/10.

Also have a look at any other products you're promoting. How are they doing and try to figure out why they might be doing better if that is the case.


This is my first affiliate site and the slap happened within 24 hours of the site launch, so I don't have any sales yet to compare results too =\

Here is one thing that comes to mind: I noticed that Mark uses redirects for his affiliate hoplinks. I was not doing this,and in addition, I was using the wrong hoplink format i.e. http://www.panic-away.com/?hop=myaffID.

I think the bot may have scanned my pages and saw this link instead of a nice redirect URL and penalized me (due to their algorithm and past bad affiliates promoting Panic Away). Normally I would just roll with the slap, but the fact other affiliates with substandard sites are able to freely promote the same products on Adwords is what troubles me the most. What made them target me?

Do you know if my SEO will be affected? If I can't rank organically in Google because they don't like my URL, I may as well scrap the site.

What do you think?
  • 1
bestdog
Posts: 8
Joined: 07 Feb 10
Trust:
21 Jun 10 2:26 am

 This starts to address my concern too. My understanding is that Google doesn't like sites that are affiliate squeeze pages, and that duplicate sites already in existance will find it hard to get displayed ?? Does a crappy site that "got here first" always get better ranking??
Can we have outgoing affiliate links a pages tagged as "No Follow" to hide them from the googlebot?
  • 1
erniewright
Posts: 10
Joined: 19 Apr 10
Trust:
02 Jul 10 6:57 am

 Hello,

Keyword is important for the website and necessary for website. It play an important role in that. Through which we get more traffic to our website.

Thanks,
Ernie Wright
  • 1
andyblack
Posts: 23
Joined: 09 May 10
Trust:
25 Jul 10 9:55 pm

 Is it a new Adwords account? If it doesn't have a history then it can crash and burn like this. When you start a new account, you have to work to get a decent history by being more targeted and aggressive than you would normally. Once Google realises they are going to make money from showing your Ads then they are more likely to keep showing them...
  • 1
robinjackman
Posts: 90
Joined: 18 Aug 10
Trust:
17 Sep 10 11:24 am

 money keywords? can anyone explain about it in detail?
  • 1
Site Admin
michellerana
Posts: 1874
Joined: 05 May 09
Trust:
03 Dec 10 12:29 am

 Money keywords are keywords that convert well to sales. These would include product name keywords, crisis keywords and how to keywords. You might also want to see Mark's comments about it on this thread: Finding "Money Keywords" or Good "SEO Keywords"
  • 1
Michelle
Customer Support
=========================

Limited time special - Pathway to Passive for $37: http://www.affilorama.com/pathwaytopassive
 

This topic was started on Apr 11, 2010 and has been closed due to inactivity. If you want to discuss this topic further, please create a new forum topic.

Topic locked