IMMania.com

Well, The “Big G” felt it was time to take out the “Hand of Death” yet again and put the big slapdown on some thin affiliate sites as well as a few other sites it deemed to be of “very poor quality” last week.

The inevitable wailing and gnashing of Webmaster teeth then ensued on the forums.

Much sage advice was offered up as to what’s behind the Slap and the various ways to slap-proof your sites. The now well-worn method for resurrecting slapped sites was also mentioned quite a bit.

Who knows how many times some of these sites have been reconstituted under the guise of a newly registered domain name along with a fresh Adwords campaign to once again receive minimum bids of .05.

Of course, without any substantial reworking of these sites to make them fit into the mold of a “quality user experience” as Google defines it, these sites will yet again suffer the next time Google fixes to do some slappin’.

I’m sorry, but I refuse to play “Whack-A-Mole” with Google.

Sure, if a site was making you some decent scratch using Adwords and it got slapped, then it’s certainly at least worth considering redoing it under a different domain name. It’s also worth taking some time to figure out what it was about your landing pages/site that made Google turn its nose up at it in the first place.

Believe it or not, I actually had one of my eBay affiliate sites slapped last Thursday. I know, it was a big shock to me as well.

The really aggravating thing, besides the indignity of the Slap itself, was this site was finally showing some very encouraging signs of actually being profitable.

It’s uncanny how Google will sometimes even just nudge up the minimum bids on keywords that are starting to make you money. It’s almost like they have tapped into the backend at Commission Junction and other affiliate networks and match up your keywords with conversions.

Didn’t Google just purchase Performics from Double Click?

Sorry, paranoia getting the better of me. Where was I? Oh yeah, so I wanted to at least hear from Google as to why they slapped my site. I knew that several others at the Earn1KaDay.com forum also had very similar sites slapped, so I wanted to see what Google really thought of them.

I had called Google about a year ago about another of my affiliate sites that got slapped and I got the canned response about it being of very poor quality. This was also after one of their “specialists” reviewed it. I really wasn’t expecting things to turn out differently this time either. But I wanted to make my case about the value I was adding to the eBay RSS feeds on my landing pages.

There was a custom-built eBay Misspellings Search Tool with a search box in the sidebar that allowed visitors to find possible bargains on eBay for misspelled auctions. There was also a sort control for the listings along with an eBay search box on the landing page.

My argument is that a quality user experience from unique content doesn’t always have to be pretty little articles, but can also be interactive elements provided by unique software scripts.

I mentioned this when I called Adwords Support last week.

The rep recited the usual stuff about having a look at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and what makes for a quality landing page. I assured him that I had read this material already and was looking for something a bit more substantial to guide me in building pages that met with Google Adwords’ approval.

The rep said he would pass my site onto a specialist and with it being Friday, I should hear something back from them on Monday. Fair enough.

To my surprise, I received an email later the same day, only about an hour later actually, that stated the following:

“Thank you for calling in to AdWords today. I have consulted with a specialist and have confirmed that the quality review of your site was correct, and that your current landing page quality is very poor. Sites that don’t include useful content, products, and/or services for internet users are often difficult to advertise efficiently and effectively. I understand that you do have some special features on your site, but since the majority of your site is occupied by RSS feeds, such as the one from eBay, our system has determined that http://www.xxxxxxx.com/xxxx.html does not provide a high quality user experience. I apologize for any inconvenience this designation has caused you. “

Regardless if visitors found my site useful, I think the key point to take from this is that Google will never contradict the “Algorithm“. How could they?

The Algorithm has taken on a life of its own and is protected at all costs — both the nature of it as well as its judgement, which is both absolute and final.

At the end of the day, it’s Google’s casino and they can run it any way they damn well please and that means deciding who can and cannot play at their tables.

I hear a lot of blustering after one of these slaps about how there are other PPC search engines besides Google and we’ll just go elsewhere.

You ever try to get traffic from MS Adcenter? Let alone impressions?

I know people do quite well with it, but I’m not one of them. Face it, I’m just too lazy to switch PPC SEs and I’m also very spoiled by the Google Adwords control panel.

And the Adwords Editor? Like butter!

Sure I need to broaden my horizons and use MS Adcenter and even Yahoo! Search Marketing more. Not as a substitute for Adwords, but as an adjunct to it for even more traffic.

Google slaps and  then life goes on in the IM world.