The Book Calendar

I have overwhelmed by the number of clients experiencing the Google Slap in recent weeks.

What is the Google Slap?

It’s when Google reduces your Quality Scores overnight, making your minimum bids extremely high, in some cases as high as $10.  Some accounts become inactive overnight, even when they had previously been highly profitable for both the advertiser and Google – as the advertiser had been spending $10,000+ per month!

What causes the Google Slap?

Google has now decided they do not want poor quality landing pages, poor quality sites, money making affiliate schemes or many lead generating sites.

If you haven’t been slapped yet, you soon will.

How can you get around the Google Slap?

It is necessary to do the following:

Assess landing pages. Google dislikes one page websites, or websites that ask a user to signup on the landing page. Websites which are highly relevant, and at least 5 pages are the only ones that now work. They should contain Ts and Cs and a privacy policy. Google also dislikes affiliate sites where links on the landing page are mainly to affiliate sites. Ensure you have keywords which very closely match each advert. You HAVE to get a Click Through rate of at least 1%, or you will end up with a low Quality Score. Keywords need to be moved into extremely focused groups to ensure a high Click Through Rate. Write adverts with the main keywords in the headline, and ideally in the main body of the advert too Content network should be turned off due to the likelihood they will create a Click Through Rate of less than 1% If content network is required, separate campaigns should be run ONCE the quality score issue has been fixed If this all fails, the easiest thing to do is move everything to a new account and start again. Quality Score will immediately restart at 5, and providing the keywords and ads are highly targeted, this will fix the issue.

Overall, taking these steps should fix the issue.