Is your business in line with the Google model?
April 25, 2011 1 Comment
Google is known for taking a hard line approach extremely to those who use their products that break their policies. This goes for all products, including AdWords. With adsense, if you click on their ads which get understandably prohibited and even as an AdWords advertiser, if break policies, are treated with equal indiscrimination regardless of how much spent. The advertisers of AdWords spending millions a year have attracted that Google simply dislike more and can take their money elsewhere.
In order to keep the ever-changing search marketing space, we absolutely operate our own sites. How can we help a client with your site’s ecommerce if you don’t have a US themselves or worked in at least one before? It would be like paying an accountant to do your accounts without experience only after reading “accounting for beginners”.
To operate our own sites, we have had to create and make your site from scratch and use those sites to better understand what makes that each brand’s search engine. We could just test techniques sometimes risky customers sites now could? The lowest point of entry for this is affiliate marketing. I have never spoken of affiliate marketing in this blog before, but I’m going to today.
Let’s get this straight, Google probably hate affiliates , to be more specific, affiliates will use AdWords and fully understand why. Leaving aside the fact that a large majority promote some less savory products or services (sometimes openly illegal products and services) from the point of view of Google, not a work of affiliates to help a search engine (your customer) to find a product or service is, it is yours.
One of the most important articles I’ve read in the light of Google’s affiliate marketing that summarizes things has been the AdWords quality score: can your business model be banned written by Andrew Goodman, of means of zero of the page. This article was way ahead of its time and if you are a marketer’s affiliate, would suggest that you read if you use AdWords. The basic idea for affiliates is to adapt and one change your business model or get out of hell. Hoffman, RAE’s open media has the definitive guide on where to go from here with affiliate marketing. If you have not read, it is behind. They have been left behind the days of affiliates does not provide any value making a ball quickly and easily. If you don’t add value, and much of it, he is in trouble. I would also like to point out that the lines between the policy of organic and paid Google search is becoming thinner. What once could “get away with” because you paid Google already is not possible. PPC SEO is now real.
One of the benefits (and sometimes an obstacle) as a qualified AdWords company is that we have a direct contact with the AdWords agency team. We have a love-hate relationship with our representatives from Google and I have at times been flatly rude them (sorry guys!) due to its notoriously cryptic and secret policies. But when you learn to read between the lines of what you are saying, their policies are meaningless and we can learn much.
Now, many “innocent” advertisers have been caught in suppression of Google in subsidiaries through AdWords get “slapped” with minimum bids of 10 € (affectionately called a slap in the face of Google), effectively making their unsustainable accounts. While I disagree with how to go about it, I understand why do them it. No point keeping clean “product” (AdWords), but do so stereotypical automatically Google can cause a large number of false positive. If you are a legitimate advertiser trapped in a slap in the face of Google, there is something you can do:
Make sure that all has been done to improve its rating of quality.Make sure that no featured links affiliates.Ensure that affiliate links are marked as “sponsored”.Make sure that it is clear that its business model is not Commission based. (In the traditional sense affiliate)
Make sure that you have an address in your site.Make sure that the site follows all the guidelines of quality. (As usual, this is only a small subset)
Make sure that the site is not a page of bridge or a site of bridge.Be sure to offer your own product or service.
Submit your site for manual review.
* If you are a member, don’t bother sending your site for manual review, may only make yourself look stupid. Google does not want more affiliates and advertisers. If you can read between the lines here, probably it should not be a member of the CFP. (The age of white labelling has begun);
Once a Google rep of support has reviewed your site and confident that you are not a member, after a day or two, you should see your minimum bids back to normal and the flow of traffic. For a more detailed breakdown that I think that he is involved in this “review” highly recommend joining the SEObook community. There are some documents updated juicy… behind the scenes there that can help a lot to understand what you are looking for an “evaluator”.
Perry Marshall makes an excellent point in secret criteria post of his Google to judge (and hot) Web site:
Perhaps suggest…. Add “A representative of Google would send his grandmother to this site” to your bag of tricks and we will do our best to make the Internet a more trustworthy place.
Above all, not to make Google look stupid and remember an adwords advertiser is not a client of Google, the search engine for average Joe Soap.
Update: it seems that this is getting worse. The writing has been on the wall since I wrote this and now much more genuine advertisers are being outright “banned by the something”. Barry has some degree of coverage here and prohibited multi million $ advertisers have their opinion above in WebmasterWorld.
Update 2: Google just updated its “Web site types to avoid” page here. The following are some notable additions almost in line with what I have been saying:
Sites affiliated to the main purpose of which is traffic unit to another site with a different domain
Shopping sites or poor comparison travel, whose main purpose is to send users to other comparison shopping and travel sites, instead of providing useful content or additional search functionality
I think that it is the writing on the wall. It is only a matter of time before this kind of thing begins to be inforced in the organic SERPS.
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Last week, due to popular demand, we quietly launched the beta version of our global extension of Google. We have had some really encouraging comments from you as “the only reason I still use Firefox is because of its size”. Because now you can finally that Firefox let go:
A time has passed since our last update Google Global. Us we have been kicked up by the powerful Firefox 3.6 update lately too. For those of you who have been keeping update Firefox to the latest and greatest by what is could continue using Google Global, the wait is long. Today we would like to announce the release of the latest version of Google Global.
