I promise this will be the last post I make for a while regarding Google Slaps. However, I do want to summarize a few observations now that the dust has settled somewhat. Who knows, not that any of this is solid evidence of anything, but sometimes you can glean a bit about how the internals of a black box work by observing the effects of external stimulii on the behavior of the black box.
Since there really appears to be little consistency in how Google Slaps are administered, especially this last one, my theory (gut feeling) is that Google goes through these events to periodically clean out their advertising inventory.
Some advertisers will finally throw up their hands in disgust and defeat and take their advertising business elsewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an uptick in the spamming of social bookmarking sites in the wake of this lastest Slap. For many IMers, organic traffic means blackhat and spamming techniques.
Others will quickly register new domains and copy the very same content word for word onto them and point their destiniation URLs at the new domains and go off on their merry way enjoying “Great” Quality Scores and an abundance of traffic just like before the Slap.
This last scenario is what really bugs me.
What other advertising media company behaves the way Google Adwords does with respect to their advertisers?
Can you picture a newspaper or magazine out of the blue jacking up ad rates several orders of magnitude while providing the vague reason that the advertiser’s business offers a “poor customer experience”? Why should these media companies care? Yes, I realize that Google wishes to maintain the integrity of their search results — both organic as well as paid, and I go along with this up to a point.
But how about more transparency with advertisers regarding what these quality guidelines are? And I’m sorry, but the Webmaster and advertiser guideline pages on Google’s site don’t cut it.
How about face to face conferences put on by Google Adwords to train advertisers? Why the big guessing game? Are they really that afraid of people gaming the Adwords system?
Well, guess what? People are gaming the Adwords system like never before.
I think until Google closes the current loophole where merely registering a new domain and pointing Adwords URLs from a Slapped campaign at it and then turning the traffic stream back on like nothing every happened, well then, to my mind, they really aren’t all that serious about quality.
on Mar 20th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Nice Site layout for your blog. I am looking forward to reading more from you.
Tom Humes
on Mar 21st, 2008 at 8:19 am
That was very well spoken. Speaking of transparency, have you ever called your adwords specialist or used the online chat? LOL.. Everything’s a secret..sorry we can’t tell you why. So here I go, moving to third fresh domain with campaign.
on Mar 21st, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Yes, I’ve called Adwords support a few times for various reasons. The times I called about Slaps I received the usual litany of possible reasons for a low Quality Score and then had my campaign reviewed by a “specialist”. Each time they would confirm the “poor quality” of my landing page.
I think they really have no choice but to support the initial findings of the algorithm. I’ve never heard of them reversing a Slapped campaign.
To be fair, I have received good service from Adwords support for other issues I’ve called about. I’ve just been conditioned to not bother calling about Slaps.