The Google Slap, Might Be Something From The Past

The title could be a bit misleading. Google slaps are still going on.

Even “better” news: currently Google’s on a huge slapping spree on the Content Network.

QS on the content network is getting ever more tighter, and a lot of people that were banking on the content network are forced to rethink their strategies.

What I meant in the title that you may get slapped for something you did in your past. It was supposed to be a fairly short post but it isn’t, so, bear with me, I’ll give some examples first.

What is the Google Slap?

The classic Google Slap, in PPC context, is a result of Google’s algorithm finding your page irrelevant to the keywords you’re buying. As an effect of the slap you may have some or all of your keyword bids raised up to $10 per click, by lowering your keyword Quality Score.

Since Google is a living and constantly changing organism, the slap has also evolved and now takes a few new forms that don’t have anything to do with relevancy.

Example 1: In an effort to improve user experience, Google is intentionally raising bids on keywords, and what’s even worse, artificially limiting traffic. That is a global trend and there’s nothing we can do about it. You might not even feel it, unless you run $100k/month on adwords.

Google hopes that by doing so only very targeted ads leading to laser targeted content will be shown to the user. Bummer for us, hurray for the users.

Example 2: Google doesn’t like (to say the least) certain types of offers. The best example are the infamous Acai Berry offers. But Grant offers are in there too.

While some Acai offers are totally legit, a lot of offers popped up that are plain ol’ scams.

These offers usually offer a free month’s trial for S&H only, $3-$5. Then the happy camper eventually discovers, ofter one month, that he had subscribed to a recurring charge. This is stated in the TOS of the offer, and this is actually a legit model many offers adopt.

The scammy part is that those offers make it nearly impossible to cancel these charges. Same story with Grant offers btw.

So, Google’s slapping the whole vertical. Doesn’t matter if you’re with a legit offer or with the scam offer. You will get slapped.

Example 3: Google doesn’t like data collection sites, as they don’t provide value to the user. If you’re running zip or email submit offers you will get slapped. It may take a day or it may take a month, depending on bot activity, but you will. Nothing helps.

That’s what I meant by Something From Your Past:

Example 4: Recently many affiliate marketers, on PPC-Coach and elsewhere, complained about experiencing a considerable decrease in Adwords traffic (on the content network) for no apparent reason.

After a while, I’ve seen reports of it happening on accounts that were, at some point in the past, running the scam offers (see example 2). It doesn’t matter if you repented and now run legit offers only. If your account had bad history with scam offers you’re going down.

Yours truly is one of them. I was toying with those offers when I was starting out a few months ago (not actually understanding what the fuss is about, so I’m innocent, lol). But I’ve had a drop in traffic from the content network during the last couple of weeks and it appears that the word is true.

To prove that I started a new account and moved all my legit campaigns over there. Traffic is now restored to previous levels.

So there you have it. Don’t mess with Google

- Alex

P.S.
Remember my last post about reasons to use proxies? The Easy Google Profit offer in this post is restricted to US traffic… A live example.