De-Constructing Google Slap II

Most people will remember the "Google Slap" last July
when thousands of advertisers woke up to find their
minimum bids jacked up to $5.00 and $10.00 a click.
The official story was that it was a "landing page quality issue"
when in fact it was more like a "website content quantity" issue.

About 2 weeks ago they rolled in another change, this one
more subtle and affecting fewer people. But even if you
didn't notice directly, you can still probably see a shift if
you use the reports tab in your account to graph clicks
and / or impressions. Content traffic was affected the
most, for most people. Some people were severely affected.

***IMPORTANT OBSERVATION:
Having been through several rounds of this - and knowing
that the game is going to continue to evolve as time goes on,
with more Google slaps and more interesting twists - the
people who stay in the know always wind up on top and the
losers who get on discussion boards and bitterly complain,
continue to be losers. You get to decide whether to stay
plugged into reliable information - as well as provide
quality information to your visitors on your site - or keep
trying to cheat the system, which always eventually fails.***

OK, enough preaching. The core issue with Google Slap is:
There's a fringy aspect of AdWords where if your site is
small or if there's a mismatch between your ads / keywords
and web pages, Google will simply jack up your minimum bids.
When you call them they will NOT explain how to fix it. You're
on your own. Robots make these decisions, and the Google
rep on the other end of the line does not necessarily know the
formula anyway.

(I did *not* get a huge amount of emails about this. The
most heavily affected people were affiliates, people with
machine-generated AdSense pages, and people with skinny
little one- and two- page sites. Most of my customers aren't
doing that.)

Still, some people with legitimate, good quality sites
were slammed and today I'm going to give you some
tips that have made a big difference for some.

Here's a success story I got from one astute gentleman.
Pay close attention:

"Just FYI, in case you're still gathering info ... I beat Google's royal behind today:

- Added a site map, with a link to it of course
- Added a few low key outbound links to high page rank sites (very bottom of page)
- Removed the bullets from the penalized pages, and textualized them
- Added more SEO stuff (keyword rich anchor tags)
- Broke up my email articles and installed them throughout the site, linked into the sitemap

Nothing dramatic ... seems like they just tightened up the changes from round 1.

The thing is, WITH these changes, my quality score is better than it ever was
(I've now got 2 cent minimums on keywords which never had them, and that's
without any traffic coming through, strictly from the spider food)."

Don't forget that with most of these changes, while some
people loudly lose, others quietly win. I talked to a number
of people whose ads shot up to the top after this latest change.
Of course some people benefitted, because some of their
competitors disappeared.

Marketing Intelligence Wizard Glenn Livingston put it this way:

"Now that landing page is part of the quality score, it actually
provides a potential ADVANTAGE to smart advertisers who do it right.

"Just as with writing a hyper-relevant ad that gets high
click through, you can now improve your position and reduce
your ad costs when you do what Google wants. And even if it
DOES reduce opt in rates, you get compensated for this by
the reduced click costs. It's not just a matter of minimum
bids, ... the quality score is a continuum which influences
your position, # of clicks, etc., even when you ARE bidding
above the minimum."

One of my own campaigns - one that I could never get
below 5-6 cents a click - is now taking 4 cent clicks.
Haven't tried 3 cents yet. Google Slap 2 has been good to me.

Having been through several rounds of this, and knowing that
more are coming (as Google's senior staff assures me), this
is what goes on out there:

-The average 'man on the street' Google advertiser thinks
that Google is just trying to shake him down for more money,
every six months or so.

-Marketers who truly understand Relevance - who create
sites that are so sticky that nobody wants to click the BACK
button - continue to do better and better. When Google
introduced Quality Score a year and a half ago, my tuned-in
Renaissance Club Members got cheaper clicks. When Google
Slap happened this past summer, they got more clicks for
less. When Google Slap happened two weeks ago, they got
even more.

Losers lose. Winners win.

If you're not a Renaissance Club member, give it a test drive.
It's a hard deal to turn down - you get $500 of stuff sent to
you in the mail for $29.95, just for giving it a good College Try:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/club

Have a Great Thanksgiving Celebration.

Perry Marshall