Beware the Google Slap
Recently I set up a new site that I was going to promote via PPC using Google’s AdWords. I set the site up and created a page for each item and put an image of the product on the page and an Easy Content Unit comparing the prices from different merchants.
Instead of adding content I decided to start some AdWords campaigns for the site to get the ball rolling and hits coming in before I got around to writing and adding the content.
The next time I logged into AdWords to check the campaign I noticed my keywords had a 1/10 quality score and the reason given was something to do with a poor quality site. The low quality score means my ads will hardly ever, if at all, be shown.
I then added the content, waited for it to get indexed and started a new campaign on the same account for the site. Google noticed straight away and gave me another 1/10 quality score.
So now I have registered a new domain and am in the process of moving the content over.
Once I have done that I will start a new campaign for the site and hopefully it will pass Google’s criteria.
Fingers crossed…
“So now I have registered a new domain and am in the process of moving the content over.”
You’ll likely get banned for that,.
I think you’ll need to cross more than your fingers… I had the same thing happen to a new-ish site recently. It didn’t like my homepage or a specially created landing page. I couldn’t honestly see what else to do so I gave up. It’s strange they don’t give any help on this in webmaster tools, they just leave you to figure it out!
I’m otherwise happy with my site so I don’t want to change it. I guess they have tightened up the rules again but what’s annoying is that there are plenty of shopping sites with very, very thin pages and no other content that seem to have no problems using adwords. I guess they spend a lot of money which is why?
Coincidentally (or not) the next day my site disappeared totally from the SERPs – took 2 weeks to come back, albeit with slightly improved rankings.
Did this coincide with the Google Caffeine update. Often thin sites will drop when Google’s robots don’t find them authority enough.
Takes time and effort to get a site properly ranking and this will help with the Adwords too.
We’re working on a couple of bigger sites because of some of our niches are just to small / have little interest to write about them to turn them into not so thin sites.
Good luck with your journey, you will get there in time.
Gary (AffiliateProject)
Exactly the same thing happened to me. Had a great site. Built it properly following google guidelines. totally whitehat. Very SEO friendly but not over optimised. Now for some reason its plummeted down the pages costing me about £300 a month!!
I hate Google sometimes. they should give better guidelines to webmasters. Especially those who’s lively-hoods depend on them. I have learnt a valuable lesson though. Don’t have all you eggs in one basket and try using other methods of marketing.
I feel a blog post coming on!