So I followed Googles Guidelines in Adwords AND...

Kind of hard if you can't see the site and the ad used, if you post them it may allow more accurate feed back but then again, if you want to keep the niche secret that is also understandable.

Here is what you might want to look at

- Page loading time
- Make sure your keyword (exact) is in the title, desc and all other seo places
- Make sure it appears in your ad
- Contact us pages etc on your site are there
- Does the keyword fit the theme of the site

I only had limited PPC experience but thats what I look at anyway, maybe more "Experts" will be able to help .

Looks like it is at a 7/10 QS now. That is much better. Still, considering I've done all the essentials and met Google's guidelines, I was expecting a much higher QS. Sure beats a 5/10 though.

**** Google

It's like a newspaper sending out a quality specialist to inspect your store before they let you run an ad in their paper. Total bull****.

It's in direct violation to free market principles.

I pay money for ads
If my ads are relevant and effective, customers show up, buy stuff, and I make money
If my ads suck, attract off topic searchers, or otherwise misrepresent what I'm offering, then customers show up and go away without buy anything and I lose money
If I sell **** that's a scam, or illegal, there are process in palce for dealing with that, peocess OUTSIDE of search
If I make money, I spend more money on ads
I don't make money, I don't run any more ads

Pretty ****ing simple.

I can even half see them not wanting scam ads like rebills and other shady offers. But legitimate pre-sale affiliate sites with unique content given a quality score of 0 because 'the sale doesn't originate at the site' is total horse****. People selling other people's **** is the whole essense of advertising.

Big Brother Google has decided they are gonig to be judge, jury, and executioner. Like it or not, Google has about 70 percent of the search market. They're a monopoly and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

So get used to greasing up your ass and bending over for the Google dick, cause that's the only way you're going to get into the show.

Here's some irony for you:
My AdWords account was banned because I was driving traffic to affiliate sites, and these same sites are ranked in Google's top 10 organic.

Now consider this: how long before Google starts putting a quality score on ALL sites? The game will well and truly be over then.

I've been with AdWords since the start. Over the years I've spent close to 200K - a lot to me, but chump change to Google, I know. Some of the sites they put a QS of 0 on were sites I'd been advertising for YEARS, and I mean the same site, same content, same affiliate offer with NO problems at all.

About a month after that, I get the you've been canned email, based on my 'history of advertising thin content sites.' Well they didn't have any problem taking my onmey for the last 8 years to advertise these sites, did they? These were legitimate micro niche sites with 3-5 pages of content pre-selling REAL products, not scammy rebills or acne cures or the like. They been profitable for all that time.

**** Google.

QS Primer

If your keywords are relevant to your page, which represents about 25% of the score, most of what is left is CTR.

QS is a measure of how well you are doing against others using that keyword. It is normalized by position. So, if you are in 6th position with a CTR of 3% and the historical CTR at that position is 3%, the system will calculate an average QS which appears to be 6. A lower CTR results in a lower QS and a higher CTR a higher QS.

QS is calculated for each ad-keyword combination. An average is taken if you have more than one ad and only active ads are used in the calculation. For ranking and price calculations, the ad-keyword's actual QS is used.

Learn more in the Adwords FAQ.

The system needs data for its QS calculations. The more it has, the more stable the calculation. For a new campaign, it makes some assumptions and goes from there. That's why you may notice wilder QS variations at first. It doesn't know your true CTR so assigns a QS based on other variables. Should your ad be worse or better than that first assumption, you might see your QS go up and down by a few points. But once you have reached a certain threshhold of clicks and impressions (a few dozen clicks, a couple hundred impressions), you will find your QS very stable.