I have been advertising with Google Adwords since their inception about six years ago. Up until last year I was spending about $1500 to $2000 per month and very happy to do so.

When Google made their changes about a year and a half ago my traffic started to drop and keywords fell off ($10-$15 per click). About six months ago on several of my most important campaigns they moved all my keywords into oblivion ($10-$15 per click).

I have not changed my keywords nor my webpages (until very recently) in all these years as they were making money on a regular basis.

I contacted Google and their rep told me I had to improve my web page quality and separate my keywords into groups with dedicated landing pages.

I tried this to no avail as they quickly moved all bids over $10.

My main sales page is a long one page sales letter but it is relevant to my keywords. So, recently I made some changes and included out bound links to some of my other sites as well as adding about 35 articles all focused on my keywords.

I put the new page up the other day and by the next morning all 127 keywords were over $10.

Can anyone help me? Is there is resource (book, CD, DVD, subscription) that I could purchase to help me with this?

Mike I'm not an AdWords expert, but I'll try to help. There could be a variety of reasons for the low quality score. It's not just about the keywords on the page matching the keywords in the ad. Google wants to see a quality page that's relevant to the ad. I believe CTR on the ad will also play a role in quality score.

I think if you search around for 'quality score Adwords' or something similar you can find more details. I've also heard that Andrew Goodman's book on AdWords is a very good one. Search his name and AdWords or ebook and you should be able to find the book.

Yes, I have read Goodman's book.

I don't know what they are looking for in a website. I have read their guidelines and I think my current site should fit their criteria.

Does anyone know of an Adwords expert I could hire to change my site to fit Googles requirements. I am at a loss.

Mike

Mike if you want to provide a link to the site (and maybe some of the keywords) I'm sure a few of us here could offer some ideas or at least point you in the right direction. The quality (in Google's eyes) of the page does play into their quality score as far as I know.

The site is www.street-selfdefense.com

Some keywords are:

Self defense
Self defence
street self defense
personal protection
self defense techniques
self defense tips
martial arts self defense
learning self defense
master self defense
karate self defense
juijitsu
karate
martial arts training
street fighting
self defense course
self defense tactics

Mike I looked at your site and also some of the sites that have ads showing up. These are just some guesses on my part, but I'm thinking Google wants to see more pages on the site.

I only grabbed a few random sites with ads on the first page of results, but they generally seem to have larger sites with top or side navigation linking to other pages on the site. I also noticed your site map link didn't seem to be working.

It might not be a bad idea to create a half dozen pages and link to them with some kind of main navigation.

I also found this article on how to increase your quality score which might help if you haven't seen it.

I wish I had better advice for you, but I hope something in the above can help. I'll keep my eyes open too and see if I come across anything else.

What do think of these changes:

http://www.street-selfdefense.com/index2.htm

This is a test URL.

MIke

I think it's better. I'm guessing that it would be better to have the navigation link to other pages on the same domain instead of the other domains, but I would think it would still help.

Obviously the real test comes through Google.

Ultimately what I think Google really wants to see is more informational pages on your domain. I know what you want from the site is for people to buy the DVD, but I'm thinking Google would like some free information given away on the site. Maybe some articles or even a short clip or two from the DVD itself.

I think I would move the links to the about us and privacy pages to the top and even add more information to each of them.

How that would affect sales I don't know and keep in mind I'm not an AdWords expert at the moment. I'm giving out the advice based on things I've read since coming across your question.

Wow, that article was very interesting -- got lost there for a while. Thanks for the link, vangogh!

As for the page changes shihan02, I think the changes are much better, too but can you break down some of that info into separate pages? As vangogh said, those links are now linking to other domains...you want some content on your own site, first.

Far from an expert myself on AdWords, in fact, always learning; however, I do know that old saying, "content is king" is true, so I'd take that advice and run with it, if I were you.

Glad you like the link Jeni. It looks like Dave has a new version of the article at Search Engine Journal. I came across it earlier today and thought of this thread. I haven't read the new article yet so it may be very similar to the one above, but I thought it would be worth posting.

Definitely checking that out, thanks vangogh! I need some things hammered into my head more than once -- especially the confusing (to me anyway) aspect of SEO in Web Design!

I am wondering though if the dreaded Google Slap tags a domain and will never let it go after that point. I have had the same thing happen to me before and no matter what I did to improve the quality and lower those bids they remained astronomical because the same domain was used for those keywords.

You may find that you do so much better buying a different domain to advertise individual pages of your site or product or service with dedicated keyword rich landing pages, especially for those keywords which converted quite well for you in the past.

Maybe someone can talk about this but I have NEVER had a super slap ($10 price hikes) come down to anything worthwhile no matter how I improved the pages.

That's interesting Adam and I've kind of seen a few things that make me suspect you're right. I don't really have enough experience with AdWords at the moment to know, though I am getting some of that experience as we speak.

There seems to be two things that happen in Adwords that cannot be overcome once they happen. If you get super slapped (I am talking $5-$10 bid prices overnight) you can pretty much bet Google has slapped that entire domain. It happened to me earlier this year with a specialized music recording product. I have never recovred using that domain again, even when setting up a brand new campaign. BUT, I have overcome it by purchasing a brand new domain and simply putting the same website on that domain. I have never been slapped again. Sometimes it pays to be persistent. You are not going to tick off google since alot of times you are dealing with a mix of human and bot over there.

The other thing I have never overcome is something I found out when I made a mistake...an accidental piece of knowledge. I had a magnificent adgroup going and this series of keywords was making me over $100 per day in profit. I got tricky and changed my "destination URL" and that brought my quality score back up to 0 since it was a new destination URL. I have never regained momentum in that campaign ever again. I have since created a new campaign with the same info and am slowly moving up the ladder but this is a fair warning. Every test I or my colleagues have run shows that if you change the destination URL of a campaign that has a good quality score you will lose it.

Why does that (Google slapping) happen, or what causes that to happen? I mean, $10.00 A CLICK? Ouch.

Here is an excerpt from the official Google blog in answer to what the slap is and why it happens. I always keep this on my harddrive because it is what Google says thsi is all about.

"As you may recall, we began incorporating advertiser landing page quality into the Quality Score back in December 2005. Following that change, advertisers who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords.

We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective -- indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages, while still giving some control over which keywords to advertise on.

Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we'd rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience -- since longterm user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance."

There you have it. Make of it what you will. Of course people get slapped that maybe should not and who knows 100% why it happens. You are dealing with both humans and bots when it comes to this so the reasons vary.

I think we got hit with a domain-wide slap a couple of weeks ago. No matter what we do, every bid is $10 except for 2. One for $1 and one for $5.