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Google Slap on AdWords (PPC) questions

by Kwerk
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Many of us who have used Google's PPC over the years have had the dreaded "Google Slap" happen to us. Basically, the quality score for every single keyword you have on a particular domain (including all its subdomains) suddenly goes down to nothing, and all of your PPC ads for that domain are forever useless, never to be shown again on Google. It's generally understood to be an arbitrary decision based on algorithms, and no feedback is provided by Google when it happens. No warning, no proactive help in fixing it, nothing. It doesn't matter if you had many different sites with totally different content and marketing methods, on several different subdomains of the same domain. All of them basically just die. It's as if your domain name has been blacklisted by AdWords forever.

It's a massive pain in the butt for people who have put a lot of time and effort into creating and promoting a website and an AdWords campaign (or several). By all accounts that I've heard and my own experience, Google's vague and unhelpful suggestions, if you press them on why the slap happened, will not help to get your PPC running again for that domain. You just have to start over again.

So I have a couple of questions: If you get Google Slapped on the PPC side of things so that your ads no longer show on the Sponsored Ads side of Google, does this also kill/blacklist your organic Google results for that same domain? Or are PPC and organic results completely exclusive of each other in Google's algorithmic manipulations? Has anyone had experience with this?

Also, is there a way to clone a whole website onto a new domain name, complete with an automated changing of all the links and such to reference the new domain? For the PPC side of things, you can clone a campaign in Google AdWords Editor (the desktop version of the AdWords interface) by copying and pasting at the campaign level, but it's still a pain as you have to then go in and manually change every single display and destination URL in the entire campaign. Unless someone knows a quicker way to search/replace all URLs with the new domain name within AdWords Editor?
#adwords #google #ppc #questions #slap
  • Profile picture of the author petevamp
    It was not for say a google slap but their way of eliminating affiliates from making money using their system. While making way for the large corperations to stand to make te most profit. Basically if you are promoting any affiliate program on your site. They pretty much blacklist your site from showing any ads on their network.

    This has happened to me on several sites both new and old trying to find away or a loophole around this whole matter. This did not effect my rankings in the organic searches though if anything it actually made them stronger in the long run. At the moment the only sites I can get to show any ads on googles network is my adsense sites. Why this is I have no idea but I will not run any ads for these sites for it would cost more in the long run from running an adwords campaign then I would stand to make from clicks. There for to me it is really not worth my time or effort even bothering trying to get on googles network.

    My suggestion though is to go to one of the other networks like msn, yahoo, 7search and many of the others. The rules and rankings are completely different then googles and it rarely effects affiliate sites. So you should have no problem at all getting your site to show ads on them if google basically banned your site after months of ads running like they did a few of mine just because they where affiliate type sites.
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  • Profile picture of the author markowe
    My experience with the Google slap has been that such sites have also been buried in the SERPS. I am still prepared to put that down to coincidence, though. I really doubt that the Adwords analyses are getting funneled through to the Search algorithms - but then again, anything is possible... We just don't know, but sites like that I have pretty much given up on.
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    • Profile picture of the author petevamp
      Originally Posted by markowe View Post

      My experience with the Google slap has been that such sites have also been buried in the SERPS. I am still prepared to put that down to coincidence, though. I really doubt that the Adwords analyses are getting funneled through to the Search algorithms - but then again, anything is possible... We just don't know, but sites like that I have pretty much given up on.
      The reason that may be is because those sites did not do any linking at all. Other then the links they did receive from the site network from google crawling the page the same time their ad was on their. So they recieved a link for a few weeks until that page was crawled again. As I stated this happened to me on one of my sites. However I did not fully rely on google adwords as others do their for I had a few days drop then built up the linking when it got hit and I was back up to where I wanted to be on the serps.

      So to put thinks easy do not put all your eggs in one basket. Spread them out amungst many different traffic building methods. This way if you lose one you do dont lose everything you have worked your a-- off for.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lucid
    Let me try to dispel some myths.

    There are two kinds of "slaps". One that is unrecoverable, the other that is.

    An unrecoverable one is indeed one where you have been banned completely. This is due to repeatedly not following the TOS and the rules. An example is someone trying to double-serve ads with more than one account. Would you do business with someone who is cheating you? No, and neither does Google. Another example is promoting products on the excluded list. No matter how much you try, they don't want tobacco products to be promoted on Adwords. If you keep trying, you're on their naughty list and will get banned.

    Recoverable slaps on the other hand can be fixed. Having a bridge page is a common one. To advertise on Adwords once again, just change the landing page so that it is not a bridge page anymore then resubmit.

    Kwerk said:
    > It's generally understood to be an arbitrary decision based on algorithms

    As a software engineer, I must laugh at this. Algorithms follow instructions given to them based on rules. That very definition means there's nothing arbitrary about them.

    Granted, software is not always perfect. But that's why it flags a page so a human can review it.

    As for your question, SEO and PPC are independent of each other. One is not supposed to affect the other.

    However, components of PPC could be used for SEO. For example, the aforementioned bridge pages. If Google decides there are too many natural results with nothing but bridge pages for the same product, they could easily have a penalty reducing your natural rankings. They may in fact be moving that way which only makes sense. Why have a different set of rules for PPC than you do for natural results?

    As for cloning a site, seems to me that should be easy to do, depending on the tool being used. Should be really easy with Dreamweaver and similar software. They do exactly what you suggest, automatically manage links.

    With Adwords Editor, you can also globally change things in one step. Cloning the site and the campaign does not fix the underlying problem however. If you expect doing so will work, you are sadly mistaken. Instead of going through all that trouble which will get you nowhere, fix the problem. It will be worth it in the long run because other search engines may follow Google's lead. I believe that Bing will have to be more like Google if they are to compete and this may happen sooner than you think.
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