Google Quality Score
What is Google Quality Score?
You either work with it or go broke because of it. Those are your options.
So what is the Google quality score? It is a variable used by Google to reward good quality ads that link through to valuable and relevant websites. What does that mean?
So why does Google have a quality score?
Google’s reputation is based on its ability to match their users with the best and most relevant content that matches what the user is looking for. So they can’t afford to have people clicking through to shallow sites or be put off by trashy ads — otherwise the whole system would quickly fall apart and both Google and advertisers would lose out.
To ensure the people who click on ads have a positive experience, Google checks the quality of each and every ad and the site that it links to.
Which means that if your ad or your landing page are found to be wanting, Google will give you a low quality score and punish you with what is has become known as the ‘Google slap’.
And it hurts.
What is the Google slap?
The ‘Google slap’ is when Google deactivates your keywords until you either pay a hefty ‘penalty’ cost per click, or make some changes to increase your quality score.
A penalty cost per click means that instead of paying just 20 cents per click (for example), you can be forced to pay anything between 1 and 50 dollars per click. And at the same time, the position of your ad goes way down or worst will not run if the score is too low. Getting slapped by Google is a bleak situation. It can take two to three months to get un-slapped for that keyword, sometimes even longer. If you get slapped you could just set your improved landing page up on a new domain. It’s either that or wait indefinitely.
What you want to know is how Google decides whether an ad and the website it links to is high or low quality.
Some Factors Influencing Quality Score
- Your ad’s click-through rate — that’s how many times your ad is clicked on compared with the number of times it is displayed. If your ad is served 70 times during the day, but only clicked on once, that could suggest to Google that it isn’t what people are looking for, and therefore low quality.
- The relevance of your ad text. Does the text advertise the product accurately?
- The relevance of your keywords to the ads in your ad group.
- The quality of your landing page. More about that later.
These are some of the main factors influencing your quality score. But if you check out Google’s own proclamations on the subject, you’ll soon realize that they don’t reveal everything.
Google is constantly tweaking how the quality score works, so although you can get a fairly good picture of how to best achieve a high quality ad, you’ll never know the precise criteria.
Google uses three different methods to test quality score:
- The Google ad Bot.
- The historical performance of your ad. Google gives you the benefit of the doubt to start with, but if you ad doesn’t get many clicks, it will swiftly move down the ranks and each click will begin cost you more.
- And finally, a human editorial review.
The importance of a good landing page
How to write a good quality landing page that will help your quality score.
On the basic level, a good quality landing page must have the important keyword phrases in the title tags and H1 tags, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
Its believed that Google not only looks at the landing page, it also looks at the entire website that the landing page is on.
It’s not enough for a landing page to be relevant to the ad; it must also provide good value to the visitor. And Google’s definition of good value is relevant and original content, transparency, and navigability. Which means will your Grandma read it and make sense of it.
If Google sees a landing page that is essentially a one-page website, they are going to give it a low-quality score, because a one-page website doesn’t provide much value for visitors, and it certainly isn’t going to meet the criteria of content and navigability.
Not only does Google want to see that evidence of value, they also want to make sure that visitors have options when they get there.
There is evidence to suggest that Google may favor advertisers whose websites are optimized for SEO and have a high ranking in the organic search listings. But this hasn’t been confirmed officially.
So, just in case the point hasn’t sunken in, let’s recap: As an affiliate, it’s very, very important that you don’t set up a stand-alone landing page.
Instead, you should be looking at creating a value-packed website full of good information and articles — and attach the landing page (or pages) to it.
So you need a number of informative articles on your site so it is deemed a ‘quality’ site by Google.
A pay-per-click landing page doesn’t need to have the regular menu that the other pages on a site have. This means that the site owner doesn’t lose conversions from people getting distracted and clicking through to other articles. That said, the page should still linked back to the main site – just very subtly.
Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties
Landing pages work best when they are targeted to a specific keyword phrase, which is why most marketers’ use landing page duplicates for different ads, with the only difference between them being the keywords they are optimized for
The problem with doing this though is that Google’s spider will flag these pages as duplicate content.
To get around this issue, it’s very important that your landing page includes ‘no-index’ and ‘no-follow’ tags. This tells Google to avoid indexing these pages and you’ll (hopefully) be able to keep your good quality score!
More Tips to improve your Google quality score.
The Number of pages on your website — Its recommend that your website has at least 10-15 pages, even if it’s a landing page connected to the rest of the site through a small link at the bottom of the page. Sites with more pages are less likely to get slapped.
Domain Name — Does your domain name contain your keywords? The keywords in your domain, the more relevant your site is perceived to be.
Google Sitemap — if you don’t have a sitemap, you’re quality score will be lower.
Meta Tags — Use them.
Links — For some reason you get a higher quality score when you link to at least one other website. The reason for this seems to be that Google prefers pages that don’t suffocate the user; in other words, pages that provides options. So it’s helpful to have a link to another website on your landing page — it could be something like Wikipedia or another affiliate site.
Include an About Us section and a Privacy policy to fulfill the company transparency requirements.
Make sure that you create separate adgroups for related keywords. The tighter the relationship between ad and site, the better, because if the visitor can’t find what they expect in a couple of seconds, they’ll leave.
Create separate landing pages for the different keywords you are bidding on to increase the relevancy of the ad to the page. Landing page and ad relevancy is a common reason for getting slapped.
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