The Latest Google Slap

By Steve Renner | July 19, 2008

So what’s up over at Google…

The Search Engine Marketing giant has dealt another serious blow to the Internet Marketing community. This is more bad news for Google Advertisers. A recent change to the Google AdWords algorithm has resulted in a Double Hit for advertisers:

Now the rates you’re paying for ads have skyrocketed
The conversion rates for those ads are dropping like
flies at an insecticide factory.

It’s no wonder that Advertisers Are Pissed Off over this the latest “Google Slap”. Google it trying to pass it off saying “The plummeting click-through rates on its ads are a good thing” .

We’re Not Buying It!

Wired Magazine recently published a story on it’s blog that quoted a Google Advertiser, who calls himself Sam, as saying:

“If it were just a rate increase, I would have tolerated it. But my ad rates have doubled and I’ve got no business,” says one longtime AdWords advertiser, “Sam,” who doesn’t want his real name published for competitive reasons. He says he runs a very specialized niche service, and doesn’t want his competitors to know about his current business crisis.

Google claims that the drop in paid clicks is intentional. The logic being that: If they (Google) serve fewer but more relevant ads for a given search query, it could increase click-through rates and thereby ultimately raise the ad rates. (For Who For Them?) This in turn should be beneficial for advertisers, who may get fewer clicks, but better quality leads from their ads.

Yeah Right!

The affected advertisers say it isn’t working according to plan. “Sam” says he got about 100,000 impressions on ads served for two keywords in February (which resulted in $250,000 in revenue), and in March that number dropped to 20,000 impressions and essentially zero revenue. To compensate for lost sales, he says he started buying advertising from Yahoo and Microsoft.

It’s not clear exactly how Google altered its algorithm, but many online marketers believe the company adjusted advertisers’ quality scores, based on the content of the landing pages on their websites.

Amit Mehta commented on his Super Affiliate Mindset blog that:

“Google is really opposed to these thin affiliate marketing sites that people put up just to run advertising on. They want to promote real websites or people with real businesses, and they’ve gotten really good at sniffing out advertisers who are just there to make a quick buck.”

Amit is a firm believer in building high quality “Authority Sites” as opposed to “Quick and Dirty” affiliate sites. He also mentioned that Google intends to Slap every Quarterly (Every 3 Months).

Another friend of mine Gauer Chaudry said he believes the Latest Google Slap is due to “Human Review”

“I am 99.9% sure that this (his) web site was slapped because it went through a human review. How do I know? Because I registered another domain name and *copied* the exact web site over with zero change except the domain name and got my “Great” quality scores back and minimum bids down to the $0.04-$0.05 range.

So if the Google bot thinks my site is great, then I can only conclude that the original site had gone through a human review which in my opinion raises a serious red flag.”

Gauer is a very smart Internet Marketer who drives a lot of Pay Per Click traffic, in the $100,000’s per month range.

There is a problem with “Human Review” and that is that there’s not much consistency. Google could have site reviewers in multiple countries who may have a completely different interpretation of the Google guidelines.

So, has Google become Arrogant, Yes! Do they Give A Damn about the individual advertiser, No!

“Sam” says he got about 100,000 impressions on ads served for two keywords in February (which resulted in $250,000 in revenue), and in March that number dropped to 20,000 impressions and essentially zero revenue. To compensate for lost sales, he says he started buying advertising from Yahoo and Microsoft.

Way to go Sam… Is it just a coincidence Google’s Stock plunged last week, nearly 10%!

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