Adwords and Landing Page Only Sites

Posted on February 16, 2007 in Google Adwords  

Since several months ago Google Adwords started updating the Quality Score system and sites / landing ages seem to get hit with the $5.00 and $10.00 bids. From emails and comments I am getting it appears Adwords made another round. Surprisingly I wasn’t really affected. Here are a few reasons why I am glad for the update and why I am frustrated by it.

I am glad for the update mainly because it knocked out some of my competition. This change has been coming and those just standing by and praying they don’t get hit by the QS system have noticed the system isn’t swayed by prayer. So in turn it has knocked out some of my competition, but I am sure some will be back with keyword stuffing, redirects and probably even some black hat methods to get back up in PPC.

I am frustrated by the update because in the past I have had target sites or landing pages providing people with what they were searching for and it got hit by the QS system. I mean if someone wants to buy a blue widget and I send them to a page for them to buy a blue widget and it converts well, why should I get hit with 5.00 bids. My CTR is great 10% or better, and I provide what the user wants. I think this is where Google is messing up. They are applying more blanket rules across the board when sometimes those blanket rules don’t need to be applied. 

So looking forward as a person promoting CPA offers you have to look into building more of a mini site or other techniques to trick the QS system. What are your thoughts on Adwords Quality Score System?



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Comments

One Response to “Adwords and Landing Page Only Sites”

  1. Chad on February 16th, 2007 11:15 am

    CPA, I agree with you regarding the one-pagers that are getting slapped with high bids. If it’s a page where visitors get what they are searching for, I don’t see why there has to be tons of content on it to correlate with a good quality score. With respect to this, I feel that Google needs to make some changes to their QS algorithm.

    Based on the comments and emails that you have received, approximately how much time is passing between each QS update? I’ve read that the QS bot visits landing pages approximately once per month, and can even be more often than that.

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