Online Marketing Experiment

Failure is never easy to deal with it and to be honest I experience it every day with various tasks that I implement. It’s never easy and I am really not sure if it ever will be.

With that said, sometimes you just have to pick yourself up and get back on the horse, even laugh at yourself a little. So we found a UB40 song that had the perfect lyrics for our “Google Quality Score” which we were laughing about when we got hit.

They rate their quality score between one and ten. Saw UB40 live not too long ago, good show.

Best Wishes
Paul

Here is an interview with Alex Goad which may give you some insight into the latest “Google slap” which hit the web on Wednesday the 21st.

Initially I thought that just fake blogs, review sites and thin affiliate sites were getting slapped.

As more information comes to light it seems even well constructed sites and blogs with valuable content are being hit and to be honest that is what happened to us with the Golf Blog.

We were using a traffic lab redirect link which pushed the click through to our testing lab before re-directing to an affiliate offer.

Even though we had it re-direct at the first level we still got slapped.

The common variable tends to be a naked affiliate link that kicks in the slap but again as always there are other complexities involved which of course makes it more challenging to reverse engineer.

Again there are other factors relative to your market.

You can check out the Alex Goad Interview here

It’s Official. I can confirm that Google has landed another slap and affiliates are going to be caught in the cross hairs.

Here is what it seems they are doing.

They are currently cutting out all fake blogs and fake review sites.

Why, well all relates back to Google’s business model and that is “search”, delivering relevant results to those using their search engine.

Google’s goal is to provide valuable content to their searchers and good content relates to providing value.

If your site does not add value, there is a good chance that you will find it difficult if not impossible to promote your site using Google’s natural search and paid search platform.

There are work arounds - such as cloaking your affiliate links, however keep in mind that at the end of the day if you do not provide value you will constantly be looking over your shoulder.

I will go into more detail on this on the next post.

We just recently ran into a problem when we began split testing landing pages using Adwords as part of our PPC testing.

Our landing page quality score started to drop to a score of “1”. As it happened we thought there was an issue with our landing page and the way we were split testing.

In addition we were using an I-frame on one of the pages and thought this was the issue since it incorporates hidden content.

Google does not like hidden content on a page.

As a result we started testing landing pages with no I-frame and no A/B split mechanism.

I even ran ads directly into the blog. The result was the same, the quality score dropped.

What it seems the problem was, (as we isolated variables) was affiliate links on the page which we were not cloaking.

Then yesterday I got an e-mail from Perry Marshall suggesting that Google was slapping landing pages with affiliate links.

Especially review style pages.

Is there a work around, yes there is. One is to build a list using an optin form with lots of good content on the page as opposed to linking out to an affiliate offer.

Create a thank you page with Google java script to see which keywords are converting and use those keywords on different PPC platforms such as Yahoo and MSN.

These keywords you can use for direct sales.

The fact is building a list is a good idea anyway because you build a customer base as opposed to trying to sell your visitors on the first visit.

I will keep you posted as we learn more.

Best Wishes
Paul