Google Slap
Back from skiing, and now I can see why everyone makes such a big fuss about snow and adrenalin.
Whilst I’ve been away it looks like Google has tweaked its quality control on Adwords delivery (GoogleSlap). As I’ve mentioned before, Google’s imperative is relevancy and legitimacy.
Ultimately, Google wants info, non-commercial sites to appear in the organic listings, and commercial sites to pay for listings in the Adwords column. As Google’s revenues increase it can afford to be more picky about who and what lists.
Google tells you how relevant your add is, with the quality score column. When you log-in to your account you won’t see this by default. You’ll need to click customise columns first.
Keywords are then rated as poor, OK and great. A poor rating will usually cause a keyword to be suspended. Bad ratings are caused by:
- Poor matching of keywords, ad, or your landing page. You need relevant copy.
- Scatter gun approach - e.g. lots of ads, keywords, all pointing to the same landing page.
- Poor or irrelevant site content (if Googlebot can’t trawl you’re site, this could penalise you).
- Your target keywords are difficult for any advertiser to achieve relevance
What’s Google’s goal here? To make sure that when browsers click on the advert, they are satisfied with the result. Can you imagine a local newspaper refusing to take an ad because they’d discovered less than 1% responded?? I like the concept, as it can only build marketing integrity, and in theory, the good guys get the customers. Very Google.
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