How to stop Google slapping you silly…
Posted in Adsense, Blogroll, Niche Websites on August 17th, 2006Just recently Google seems to have gone completely hostile…
Webmaster are crying foul because their sites have disappeared from the search rankings and many people using Adwords to promote any kind of product found themselves without an income, when all their campaigns got hit with massive keyword costs.
Two groups of marketers in particular who got themselves slapped silly are:
- Affiliate marketers, and
- Those doing Adsense/Adwords arbitrage
So just what is going on?
Nothing earth shattering actually, just Google looking after their future interests. They have decided to declare war on what they recon are crappy websites.
Why?
Because if anybody who uses the Google Search Engine clicks on a link and is taken to a crappy website, it’s not the website owner who gets a bad name - Google does…because they published the link in the first place.
Let’s put it this way - just recently Google has been displaying a lot of results which point to pages that contain nothing but links to other pages, and that is really frustrating! Did I blame the webmasters who built the pages? Nah… I got stroppy with Google for showing me the pages in the first place!
It is just this kind of experience that Google wants to stop, and as I explained in my last article they have spent a lot of money on digitizing library books to give themselves a solid foundation on which to experiment with different algorithms.
The future with Google is to build good websites which contain useful information. This also seems to apply to any website advertised using Google Adwords.
In essence, a single page website will attract upwards of $20 keyword click costs (this includes sites that use an optin squeeze page up front)…a multipage website will attract lower costs, and a website with pages directly related to the Adwords Advertisement will attract the lowest costs. Bear in mind with Adwords there are a lot of other factors to contend with, but I’m not going to discuss them here.
Just a quick thought…I wonder if Google’s decision to get tough on Adwords customers was not in part due to the advice given to anybody whose websites had been banned, to get traffic through adwords - I’m sure it was a factor.
So if you can’t use single arbitrage pages or squeeze pages, where do you go from here?
- Build individual pages for each of your keywords (and throw in a few related keywords and synonyms to keep the Google Search network happy) and then write an Adwords ad to advertise that page.
You will most likely have a number of keywords resulting in a number of ads and webpages. Link them all together with a menu at the bottom of each page so it’s the last thing any visitor will see - this will keep the Adwords bot happy as it will think each page is part of a larger website, any “Google Human” will also be satisfied that the page is part of a related website.
Jim Edwards and Perry Marshall got together and created a great video showing you how to do this which you can watch here http://www.igottatellyou.com/Google-Sucker-Punch.html
- When it comes to Adsense/Adwords arbitrage, you need to create a site as explained above but be careful how many Adsense ads you display - If the website obviously looks like it only exists to earn Adsense revenue, it’ll get the can and maybe your account too…
There is no exact way of doing this, you’ll have to do a fair bit of testing to see how many and where to place your ads, but a general rule of thumb is:
If you want to earn from Adsense, put your Adsense ads above the fold (i.e.in the first screen) and your affiliate links (if you have any) below the fold.
If you want to sell affiliate products, put your affiliate link above the fold and keep your Adsense ads below the fold (i.e. at the bottom of the second half of the page).
- Some of the most effective affiliate sites do some sort of product comparison and link to the top three products. Your task is to create a whole series of these pages (each focusing on a particular keyword phrase) and make the site look sensible. By this I mean don’t replicate a page numerous times and just change the keywords… Google will spot the duplication and penalize you.
- When it comes to getting subscribers, not being able to use a squeeze page has really got people the back foot, but there is an alternative which doesn’t involve an optin form on each page. You could use a “Reverse Squeeze Page” which allows your visitors to view the first two pages, but when they leave the second page (or whatever page you decide) they are presented with a squeeze page. Click here if you want more information…
At the end of the day, the Google slap might have been a good thing. It has forced us to take a good look at how we build different type of webpages, and by building them all to interest our web visitors, we stand an excellent chance of using Google Adwords to cost effectively promote them while they climb the search rankings.
On a personal note, I’ve never concentrated only on affiliate marketing websites, but I am going to, and I will start out by using Adsense to offset the Adwords costs (after all, I’m good at creating profitable Adsense sites), and as the campaigns becomes more profitable I’ll slowly phase out the Adsense ads (why settle for 5c per click when you can get $15 or more).
There are exciting times ahead
All the best,
Colin
Tags: Online Marketing, Internet Marketing, Adsense, Adwords, Google Adwords, Perry Marshall, Jim Edwards, Affiliate Marketing, Niche Marketing, Visitor Enhanced Optimization, SEM, Search Engine Marketing, Website Promotion, Website-Promotion, Web Site Promotion, Web-Site-Promotion, Site-Promotion, Site Promotion, More Site Traffic, More Website Traffic, More Web Site Traffic, Increased Web Site Traffic


