Google cracking down on sales and landing pages?

[mikie46]

In the past 24hrs, two of my PPC friends have emailed me telling me that their keywords and landing pages, pages they have been running for more than a year, keywords they have been running for about that long, have been adjusted to a QS of 1/10. Previously their QS was 8 or better.

According to Markethealth and a few others Google is cracking down on landing pages. So far i am no affected but i would like feedback from others who have experienced this in the past few days.

If this is true, WTF do they expect people to do? Create full page blogs? It is really ridiculous if you ask me. Sooner or later, the way they are treating their PPC customers, we wont be allowed to use landing pages.

 

[GTP_Smile]

wTfu, I'd report them if I were you.
why'd they lower QS

 

[loremipsum]

This same thing happened to me on 2 of my sites. Had been running fine with no problems and Qscores 7/8 out of 10 and then one day they were all in the basement at 1/10. I asked Uncle G what the problem was and got the usual answer without answering reply from them. (This is all white hat web sites.)

I tweaked the landing page a bit, couldn't really find anything "wrong" after re-reading the landing page guidelines and kicked up the daily budget. Nothing happened. I upped the price of my keywords and set the daily budget to $300 a day and still nothing. It hasn't been delisted but it never gets an impression.


I am on other WH forums and this is happening all over, seems to be a crack down on landing page issues. Or, maybe Uncle G just likes BH better!

 

[orangeblossoms]

Do the sites consist only of landing pages?

I discovered installing Wordpress and creating a couple of keyword rich posts helps a lot with overall QS scores of your lp's. In one case, I had QS 8+ for many "make money online" keywords to an unoptimized landing page. There could be other factors at work that I haven't thought of, but I do think having a blog helps..even though it's not even visible b/c my landing is on top of it.

 

[milligan]

My campaign weren't running all that long but I also went from having 8's, 9's and 10's to nearly all 1's. It was all due to landing page quality, not relevance or performance.

I was using a WP blog fed with content (yahoo answers and youtube vids) by caffeinated content.

Reviewing the the LP guidelines I cam to the conclusion that it may have been the non dupe content that was the issue. I am using WP rewrite now and will see what happens.

It was also suggested that it may be because it was an acai offer that I was promoting and nothing to do with dupe content.

I guess if the rewritten posts don't do the trick it may be the offer. I suppose I should put up another campaign in the same fashion (with dupe content) but with an offer that our moral compass agrees with. How about Christian No Sex Dating?

 

[warriorpoet]

This same thing happened to me on 2 of my sites. Had been running fine with no problems and Qscores 7/8 out of 10 and then one day they were all in the basement at 1/10. I asked Uncle G what the problem was and got the usual answer without answering reply from them. (This is all white hat web sites.)

I tweaked the landing page a bit, couldn't really find anything "wrong" after re-reading the landing page guidelines and kicked up the daily budget. Nothing happened. I upped the price of my keywords and set the daily budget to $300 a day and still nothing. It hasn't been delisted but it never gets an impression.


I am on other WH forums and this is happening all over, seems to be a crack down on landing page issues. Or, maybe Uncle G just likes BH better!

Same here but the funny thing was my WP semi auto-blog I had taken the adsense of and was not a landing page anywhere on it. had a 5 then 1 now zero. I was planning to use this one as a whitehat only then monetize in its niche after good traffic in an effort to slide by google. Since there was no monetization involved.Caffinated content was the issue on my I believe. Worthless. And sadly I had only maybe 30 posts out of 211 that were caff. They lowered to QS 1 now it is 0. WTF? Big G will force everyone to BH and then run. OK. They want to revisit the super splog days and then slap fine. BTW I never PPC on any of the blogs and so far my others have not been slapped. But removed the auto shit already on those. Make sure as well you adjust and and hide the plugins form the robot.txt files. I had done that on the QS5 after dropped to one but now my 200+ visitor a day blog is a 0. traffic has dropped about 20% now as has my keyword rankings but only form 1,2, 3, and 4 to 3 , 6 7 and 7 on my main keys. Maybe we should all form a union and agree to launch 1 blog each heralding the value now of BING over google..lol..only issue there is it would be like helping evil over evil.

 

[seoseattle]

I will confirm that Uncle G is upto some changes regarding landing pages. But can add that it seems only in my most competitive key words. About half of my sites have not been effected at all. Again it is my most competitive keywords like BOTOX, CRIMINAL ATTORNEY, ROOFING CONTRACTOR. These are also ones that are bidding higher PPC than my others.

 

[Bograt]

Two of my sites went from 10 to 1 reason is due to my landing page. Contacted Google got the bog standard letter i.e just implement their recomendations -which I did I then get a quality score of about 5 to 7 for about 2 hours and then back to 1! I believe the reason is because I am a ebay afil and they cant see the benefit to the customers which is crap the bottom line is I have been paying out 1000 pounds to them a month and making about 1000 pounds profit and my customers have been getting what they want now eveyone is a loser!

 

[secretboy08]

just wait till bing erodes some of its marketshare then they will be licking advertisers up.
i hate google because it bites the hand that feeds it.

 

[ccc23]

This has been going on for a while. They are shutting these down under the "No Bridge Pages" section in their guidelines. Flogs, Review pages, or any site that is designed to redirect the customer to another website will be shut down. Google is cleaning house right now. This is across all niches, and they don't care how much you have spent with them in the past (I spent close to $2m last year with them, still got QS 1).

If you haven't been shut down yet, just wait. It's coming. Google has been tearing affiliates up this year and it won't stop any time soon. Heck I even know local business owners that have been caught in this crossfire. As usual you will get no answers from Google about why it happened either.

So far the only way I have found around it is to just not sell anything from your LP's

 

[erskinem]

It's Google's pro-active response to the upcoming FTC legislation:

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/04/23/ftc-pondering-new-guidelines-for-bloggers-who-review-products/

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090622/adding-an-amazon-or-apple-affiliate-link-to-your-blog-the-feds-want-to-know/

http://www.affilorama.com/blog/honesty-may-be-the-best-policy

It looks like bloggers or anyone running a website for that matter will be required to add some sort of disclaimer, much like what is required in newspapers and television.