AdWords Quality Score Basics (Part 2)
Read previous post first for Part 1: http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/02/adwords-quality-score-basics/
…continued…
Now we need to ensure that the content of our landing page will get a good quality score. This quality score will be determined instantly by the adbot who will visit your site as soon as it knows the destination URL - so be careful your landing page has to be 100% ready before you make your advert.
Basically the adbot has an algorithm to determine what the quality of your site is. This will then later on be blended with other factors like the CTR.
This algorithm is different than the typical SEO algorithm Google uses as here incoming links are completely irrelevant: a brand new site has the same chances to get a good quality score than a very old established site. The judgment is done exclusively about the content of the site itself and not the reputation of that site on other sites (incoming links).
What we suggest is the following:
1) Ensure you have the keyword in the main headers:
- Title
- Meta Description
- Meta Keywords
- H1,H2,etc…
- Body
2) Ensure you have a decent amount of pages (Adbot punishes 1 page sites). It’s fine to just put some links to internal pages that are just articles in the footer.
3) Have the following pages:
- Privacy Policy
- Terms And Conditions
- Return Policy
- Contact Us
- About Us
I know this may seems stupid but I guess somewhat they have determined that quality sites always have those pages (possibily because their legal departement asks them to do so - which means they are big enough to be able to afford a legal departement!)
Doesn’t seems to really matter what you write in those pages, just try to write a decent amount of text so that the bot is happy.
If you follow those rules and you bury those pages in the footer even of a single page sales letter you should get a pretty good quality score. I rarely get less than 8 or 7 depending on the keyword if I do all this properly.
adwords, adwords bot, new sites, quality score, sales letters
I rarely get less than 7 on my keywords either - and I haven’t done any of this properly!
Although if it can get me up to 8 on all my keywords, I’m not hesitant to try - although, repeating keyword twice in the ad? Seems a bit off-putting to the actual user, doesn’t it? I try to use synonyms - but then again, I don’t have 1 ad per keyword either
Filippi the first campaign i launched i was slapped by google with minimum bids of $10 and $5….i know how it feels after all that hard work (hardwork with out knowing what to do is just waste what i mean)…later after Gauher’s and Amit’s suggestions was able to bring the quality scores to 7 and 8 some times even 9 when i was in the old adwords version…definitely those are the true basics to follow…don’t know when will google change the policies regarding the landing pages again…
Hey i do have a small bug in my mind….can you clear it…If am going to use a new domain as a destination URl which some other marketer used it for his campaigns in the past…and being slapped by google…now if i was to use the same domain name what are the precautions (is any) i need to take…and what would you suggest, how would i go with it?
I think it’s hard to know if a domain is cursed or not, since you have no control over it’s content. So basically if you add it into AdWords just to try you could actually penalize that domain yourself just because of the poor content. Anyone has any ideas here?